Between Patronage and Rebellion

The creative disassembly of the Golestan Film Workshop, Iran’s first independent film studio

The Crown Jewels of Iran. Still courtesy of Cineteca di Bologna and IDA.

by Ruairí McCann, International Documentary Association (IDA)

In his final years, filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan considered the state of exile that began long before he permanently left Iran in 1975, stretching back as far as his youth, to be the defining characteristic of his life. This profound sense of alienation comes from the dissonance between the aspects of his home country’s history and art that he held dear and the image of Iran cultivated by those who wielded political power. 

He aimed to countermand this control through, as the writer and Golestan’s friend Abbas Milani put it, a “republic of letters.” This imaginary country is composed of the many essays, short stories, poems, and novels that Golestan wrote and published over the last eight decades. Writing was his first and last vocation, and the thoroughfare to his extraordinary work as a filmmaker. In the wake of his death in August, at the age of 101, his films were recently screened as part of the most ambitious film series of the year, Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979, which ran at New York’s MoMA from October to the end of November. 

“Infrequencies”

Kamrooz Aram Breaks Down the Grid

Rather than deconstruct Western modernism or reinsert Islamic visual idioms, the artist loosens the grip of the grid.

Kamrooz Aram, “Exuberant Flâneuse” (2020), oil, oil crayon, oil stick, and wax pencil on linen (left) and detail (right). Courtesy Aruna D’Souza/Hyperallergic.

by Aruna D’Souza, Hyperallergic

Kamrooz Aram was everywhere I happened to be these early months of 2026, and I’m all the luckier for it. He exhibited at Nature Morte in Mumbai for Mumbai Art Week, is currently on view at Alexander Gray Associates in Tribeca, and makes a rich appearance — almost a mini-solo show — in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. 

Aram, born in Iran and a graduate of Columbia’s MFA program, is known for his play with the grid. It’s a project that is archeological and critical at once, as it underlies two traditions that are often understood at odds: Western modernist abstraction, on the one hand, and non-Western, and specifically Western Asian, decoration (above all, pottery and tilework) on the other. Aram’s paintings, with their gorgeous and provoking palettes (why do his colors seem so familiar and unfamiliar at once?), refuse to understand these two sources as a binary. Such a bifurcation only serves Western modernism’s insistence on self-referentiality and immanence, at the expense of other visual languages. For this painter, the organizing logic of the grid is precisely where order breaks down when it comes to understanding how line, shape, color, and arabesque relate to culture, and how cultures relate to each other.

In Mumbai, this grid was on full display, in a series of paintings that emphasized a vertical arrangement across the width of the canvas, interrupted (perhaps complicated is a better word) by curving forms that evoked both the organic (the edge of a flower petal, perhaps a limb or buttock) and the definitively non-organic (enamelwork, the inlay of precious stone in marble). The colors — reds, grays, blue-greens, midnight blues, blacks, and even yellows — likewise sit in a strange space between the natural world and the ur-natural. The problem (or pleasure) of abstraction is the way it acts as a screen for all kinds of projections on the part of the viewer, so indulge me now in my insistence that I saw in these pictures the structure, rhythm, and stylization of Henri Matisse’s “Bathers by a River” (1917), from the Art Institute of Chicago. This callback — and I’m sure this is not the only one, by far — is less a matter of influence than of recasting. It’s a reminder that Matisse’s arabesque — here and in his later abstractions and cutouts, especially — was quite literally a borrowing from Islamic decorative arts. Modernists worked their asses off to distance abstraction from the decorative, and declared ornament a crime, but not without absconding with it in the process.

“Iran After the Fire”—a Speculative Ethnography

Exhibit of a bombed classroom, in the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defense Museum in Tehran, Iran (photo Matyas Rehak). Courtesy The Markaz Review.

by Shahram Khosravi, The Markaz Review

A writer imagines Iran one year from now...

Summer 2027

1.

By the time Mr. Mardani arrives in the morning, the corridor outside his office is already occupied. Men and women sit shoulder to shoulder along the walls, waiting to be called. The guards move them in small groups. Names are checked, then checked again. Files accumulate faster than they can be processed.

The war has not ended; it has only changed form.

Before the war Mr. Mardani had planned to retire. In his mind, the future had been simple: a small house near the Caspian Sea, mornings in the garden, afternoons with his wife, the slow fading of a life spent in service. Instead, one year after the war, he works longer hours than at any point in his career.

But the officer he had served under for more than two decades was killed in the first week of the war, when an Israeli strike hit the central building of the Intelligence Organization. Mardani did not ask for the position, but neither did he refuse it. 

In the first months after the ceasefire, the priority was chasing the infiltrators. Lists circulated, names of suspected collaborators, informants, those accused of contact with foreign intelligence. Some cases were substantiated. Many were not. Confessions were recorded, and some later appeared on television. 

Later, the focus shifted. Protesters, students, those who had been visible in the streets during the final months before the Israeli and U.S. bombs began to fall. Their files were thinner, often consisting of images, fragments of social media posts. Still, the directive was clear enough. Mardani had heard it himself, delivered by the Intelligence Minister before he was killed in an overnight attack: dissent was no longer a civil matter; it was an enemy of the country and should be treated accordingly.

In “When the Div Came Home,”

Soheila Kayoud Mixes Whimsy and Macabre

The Iranian-born artist’s first solo exhibition at Andrew Rafacz uses mythological creatures to explore otherness.

Soheila Kayoud, “Divs #11,” 2025, Hand dyed wool on muslin, 19.75 x 16 in. Courtesy Newcity Art.

by Emma Riva, Newcity Art

To understand reality, Soheila Kayoud turns to the fantastical. The Iranian-born artist’s first solo exhibition, “When the Div Came Home” at Andrew Rafacz, uses mythological creatures to explore otherness. Where it can be alienating to be on the outside, Kayoud uses the div, a demon-like figure from Middle Eastern mythology, to show the whimsy in being an outsider.

Kayoud had a long career as an engineer and began formally making textile work during the pandemic. “When the Div Came Home” is the work of an artist with a lifelong love of learning and a mixture of technical skill and a vibrant imagination.

The dynamism Kayoud achieves with thread is astounding. She renders fabric as a painterly material. The divs’ bodies have vertical threads defining their figure, whereas the landscapes have swoops and long horizontal lines to create structure and composition. The works have real movement in them, even more so than some painted canvases. “Divs #11” is an impressive example of this, with the cross-legged div sitting on a glamorous chaise on a checkered floor. The sheer amount and depth of patterns is staggering—with only one material, Kayoud creates multiple planes.

Bashu, Beyzaie and the Paradox of Iranian Identity

In 1986, as the Iran – Iraq war raged on, Bahram Beyzaie completed a film that would define his career and challenge Iranian self-image for decades to come.

Bashu Gharibeh Kouchak (Bashu, the Little Stranger). 1986. Iran. Directed by Bahram Beyzaie. Courtesy Little White Lies.

by Johnny Massahi, Little White Lies

Few filmmakers have loved their country as deeply or as tenderly, as Bahram Beyzaie loved Iran. A founding father of the Iranian New Wave, Beyzaie emerged, alongside Dariush Mehrjui and Masoud Kimiai, as one of the most culturally significant directors of his generation. His films – a pick-and-mix of Persian folklore, symbolism and allegory – favoured stories of outcasts on fraught journeys toward societal acceptance. Beyzaie, himself a member of the persecuted Bahá’í faith, was able to draw on his own direct experiences of exclusionary politics to become a rare, and necessary, champion for minority resistance. Nowhere is this clearer than in his 1986 film, Bashu, the Little Stranger.

Bashu stands as a sobering antidote to Iran’s state-supported ​“Sacred Defence Cinema”, a genre of war films commissioned during the Iran-Iraq war that attempted to reframe martyrdom (particularly child martyrdom) as a divine act of nationalist self-sacrifice. Beyzaie instead turns his camera toward a tragedy of displacement, uncovering an Iran far more divided than wartime propaganda dared to acknowledge. In response, the Ministry of Culture banned Bashu from screening publicly for almost three years. ​“At that time,” Beyzaie explained in a 2025 interview, ​“any word that did not glorify the war was met with threats and was strictly forbidden.” 

When the film was finally released in 1989, it was hailed as a humanist masterpiece, with a 2018 poll of Iranian critics declaring it the greatest Iranian film ever made. Now, 40 years later, at the dawn of a new conflict, Bashu has re-emerged – thanks to a timely restoration that premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival – as an urgent and enduring work that not only explores the perennial perils of war but also the complexities of Iran’s national identity.

From the Rooftops of Tehran

We in Iran own our grief, mourning all by ourselves.

Leanne Shapton: Untitled, 2022. Courtesy The New York Review.

by Anonymous, The New York Review

For the author’s safety, the translator’s name has also been kept anonymous.

It’s the second time in a year that we in Iran have found ourselves in the middle of a war—the first was launched by Israel with US aid, the second by the two armies hand in hand. In Tehran the night sky lights up when missiles hit the ground, and we look at one another with terror. Many people have already left the city. Between these two wars the Islamic Republic, our own government, killed thousands and thousands of Iranians around the country who were protesting the rulers’ incompetence and corruption, the rising price of goods, the economy’s stagnation, and the country’s lack of social and political freedom, and who by a certain point were asking for regime change. During all three of these horrors the Internet has been all but completely shut down. (I still have highly unreliable, limited access today.) Checkpoints have been set up across cities; militia forces threaten people in the streets. This paragraph is the shortest summary possible of what we have been living through since the beginning of last summer.

As I write this, on the ninth day of the war, oil facilities have been hit and black columns of smoke have darkened the horizon, rising to the heart of the sky. I cannot tell where the sun is anymore, and I write quickly, for fear that at any moment I might be killed. Writing under such urgency demands an economy of words. If I have only a few more minutes left of my life, would the things I want to say even be considered of value? What should I put down on the page as some kind of trace of myself in this world, or as a document of our time?