The ‘Imagined Freedom’ of Iranian women

on display in Seattle

Iranian artist Forouzan Safari’s work, "Imagined Freedom | Revealing Bodies Never Allowed to Be Seen," at ANTiPODE art gallery in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. Courtesy the artist.

by Ayeda Masood, KUOW

Forouzan Safari grew up in Isfahan, Iran, a city known for its historic mosques, bridges, and Persian-Islamic architecture. When she moved to Los Angeles in 2013 to study painting at Otis College of Art and Design, she immediately missed home. Inspired by memories of Isfahan, Safari began creating scenes of the city, incorporating its distinctive architecture into her work.

This month, Safari's first solo show, “Imagined Freedom,” is on view at ANTiPODEArt Gallery, tucked beneath the sidewalk on South Main Street in Pioneer Square, just past the Seattle Jazz Fellowship. The show is on display until mid-July.

Inside ANTiPODE, its brightly lit brick walls are covered with black-and-white and colorful prints depicting women doing ordinary activities, like swimming in a river, sitting outside in tank tops, drinking alcohol in a field, and expressing their sexuality. However, these are all things that could get women arrested in Iran.

While the show coincides with Iran vs. Egypt World Cup match in Seattle, Amir Amini, one of ANTiPODE’s co-owners, said it was purely coincidental.

After moving to Los Angeles, Safari began drawing digitally in 2018, posting images online that reached audiences in Iran and across the world. For audiences in Iran, the works carry a particular resonance, because they depict freedoms many viewers have imagined but cannot openly experience.

"Sometimes people say, ‘That's what we were thinking,’" Safari said. "It's kind of dreamy. People over there [Iran] also like to see it, like to dream."

For instance, one of her prints depicts a group of women dancing freely in a field, against a vivid sunset and mountains. However, slightly hidden at their feet, tracking devices are wrapped around their ankles. Safari said the juxtaposition was intentional, meant to show that the women are never quite as free as the dancing might suggest.

Iran Under Siege

Tehran Diaries: Dispatches from Iran Under Siege. By Raha Nik-Andish. New York: OR Books, 2025, 90pp.

by Paul Buhle, CounterPunch

The text of this small volume dates from April, a “yesterday” that seems eternal, because we understand so little of what is happening in Iran in wartime, and what the Iranians themselves are thinking.

The writer, using a pseudonym for obvious reasons, is an art historian and an essayist published in the London Review of Books, among other spots. We hope for his personal security.

We enter at a particularly pregnant moment, elaborated here by a three-page preface by another anonymous writer, comrade or admirer of the author. This small text was composed, as explained, during the longest internet blackout since Gaddafi sliced off service by way of Libya in 2011, when the Hillary Clinton-inspired US coup against Libya was underway. Here we are again, or rather, were when this book was composed.

In an apparently unending irony, as the author writes about the current day, the blackout has eased somewhat, but the Islamic Republic posts messages on Telegram that hardly reach anyone. In a book composed under such difficulties and thus inherently problematic, something possibly decisive can nevertheless be said.

The author struggles to make some sense of things and turns to an intriguing narrative technique. The text moves backward in time, chapter by chapter, through Operation Epic Fury, offering readers an intimate view of where things have been seen and experienced at the ground level. We eventually learn that he has a part-time university teaching job that pays too little to survive, and he also becomes a part-time car-share driver.

Raha begins with the announcement of the Ayatollah’s assassination by the Americans and Israelis. People come out on their balconies, unbelieving, just to look around. The Basij paramilitaries, below them on the streets, immediately begin to bash anyone who is seen or heard to be celebrating. The following morning, the mosque down the street from his apartment blares patriotic songs intermittently from the Iran-Iraq War and the seventh-century conflict in which the Prophet Muhanmmed’s son was murdered and martyred. The heavy official tone is mocked by a mood of quiet happiness.

How an Iranian Designer Questions His Guardians of Faith

Courtesy PRINT Magazine

by Steven Heller, PRINT Magazine

Behnam Raeesian is an artist and poster designer from northern Iran, in the Sari, Mazandaran Province. He is working with “political urgency, symbolic minimalism and socially engaged visual language” on a project he titles The Fall of the Guardians. Through stark Eurocentric imagery, in a time of war, Raeesian looks at these figures traditionally “associated with protection, faith, justice, authority and salvation, but reimagines them as unstable symbols of silence, control, violence and collapse.”

The work is deceivingly reductive. I asked him if his employ of Western archetypes is a universal protest or one that in his country is designed to subvert taboo depictions.

What prompted you to do this series of posters?

Social and political questions have always lived in my mind, partly because of where I was born and the conditions I have observed around me. Over time, I learned how to turn these inner pressures into visual systems rather than single images. The Fall of the Guardians happens when the figures meant to protect us no longer protect. What happens when authority, faith, justice and salvation begin to produce silence, fear and collapse instead?

I wanted to make a series that could share this unease with others—not as a slogan, but as a set of images that feel immediate, sharp and difficult to ignore.

Discussing the English Translation of Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime: An Interview

A Conversation with Michelle Quay

Michelle Quay is a scholar and translator of Persian literature and was the inaugural winner of the Mo Habib Translation Prize for Persian Literature in 2023. She teaches Persian Language and Literature, in addition to Iranian Cinema and Culture, at Brown University and holds a Ph.D. in medieval Persian literature from the University of Cambridge. Her contemporary literary translation work has appeared in Asymptote Journal, The Kenyon Review, World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Two Lines Press, and elsewhere.

by Seán Carlson, The Adroit Journal

This interview took place in person over coffee in Providence, Rhode Island.

Seán Carlson: Your English translation of Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime by Reza Ghassemi (Riz̤ā Qāsimī) has been published as the world’s eyes are on Iran—with the book coming out two and a half weeks after the U.S. and Israel commenced military strikes on the country. Much uncertainty remains around the conflict’s timeline and trajectory. I’d like us to look more deeply past the present, but what about the novel speaks to this particular moment?

Michelle Quay: Some aspects of Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime really relate to the current situation: this is an exile novel written in Paris by an Iranian who was forced to leave and has had work censored under the Islamic Republic. The narrator of the novel is a thinly veiled version of the author and his own experiences of exile, even though he writes in a funny and comic and flippant voice. It’s the main theme, the trauma, the ruptures caused by migration.

But I feel torn up about it, actually. My approach to Persian translation is that I’m really interested in showcasing excellence. People often look to take an almost anthropological approach—like, this is a window into Iran, or this is a bridge, these metaphors we use. The novel was written for its original context. It’s not here just to teach you something. It’s not tourism by another means. Part of the reason I was very interested in this novel is that it’s extremely literary and well-versed in all of these different traditions. I’m worried about all of this getting collapsed into geopolitics.

Ones to Watch 2025

Every year, BJP publishes its Ones to Watch issue – their selection of the artists who epitomise the talent and creativity in international photography today, as nominated by a global network of curators, editors and artists.

Here they look at Atefe Moeini, who was nominated as part of the 2025 cohort by the artist and educator Amak Mahmoodian. 

Image © Atefe Moeini. Courtesy BJP.

by Dalia Al-Dujaili, 1854 | British Journal of Photography

Atefe Moeini first came across photography as a teenager in Iran. “I was in high school, 15 years old when I discovered photography,” she recalls. “It was the beginning years of Instagram and I was making pictures of myself – selfies – and posting them. Then my classmates said, ‘You make great pictures, you should make pictures of us too’.” These casual, peer-led sessions marked the beginning of a journey that would come to shape Moeini’s creative and political voice.

Moeini arrived in the US in 2024 and has been studying photography at Yale School of Art, “but honestly, my real education came from working in the field, making mistakes, and learning from them”, she says. Moeini marks Gillian Wearing, Chantal Akerman, and Vilém Flusser as inspirations for her work; specifically Flusser’s essay ‘Taking Up Residence in Homelessness’, which deeply shaped Moeini’s thinking on exile and creativity. The celebrated Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry has also been important to Moeini, “particularly through her ability to express the personal as political,” she says.

Without access to formal education in the field, Moeini turned to YouTube tutorials and hands-on experimentation. “I couldn’t find any schools [in Iran], so I just learnt things online,” she explains. Now at Yale, she juggles formal study with what she calls a “parallel practice”, driven by feeling, intuition and urgency.