Hope Moves History Towards Freedom

Materials Rich in Resistance

Soli Kiani (b. 1981) is an Iranian-born, Vienna-based artist who incessantly pokes at the power imbalance inherent to oppressive political regimes, devoting special attention to the one in her homeland. Emerging from the second generation of feminist art, Kiani’s multidisciplinary practice is rooted in her own background, but its aim is, first and foremost, to encapsulate the collective experiences of thousands of Iranian people. 

Soli Kiani, TRAUMA 1 and 2, 2026, 300 x 210 cm each, wax crayon and acrylic on canvas. Photo Kunstdokumentation.com. Courtesy Contemporary Lynx

by Pola Folwarczny, Contemporary Lynx

The artist’s socio-critical commentary manifests itself through pieces that tangibly evoke the raw feelings and sensations they are meant to capture. Moving between installations, objects, photography and painting, she creates powerful expressions of the loss of control and freedom that so many experience. By bringing audiences closer to conditions of life that they often find unfamiliar, she forces Western society to at last turn its eye to the injustices of the surrounding world. Kiani undermines the seemingly inevitable, pushes at the limits of what’s deemed acceptable and creates resistance in form, material and content.

Work in Progress:

Koushna Navabi

Finishing new works for Frieze London that turn geological maps and found tree trunks into sites of metamorphosis, Koushna Navabi unravels the personal and political histories of her practice

Koushna Navabi's works in progress. Courtesy: the artist

‘For years I was terrified to make political work,’ says Koushna Navabi. For the Iran-born, London-based artist, acts of knitting, stitching and weaving were personal solace from the external horrors of the Iranian Revolution, from which she escaped as a teenager. Navabi was training as a ballet dancer in 1979 when her school shut down and she was forced to flee the country alone. ‘All I had was this bodily memory of dancing,’ she says, ‘and I think I carried that into my work.’  

Originally self-taught, Navabi moved to London in 1993 to complete an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She works across knitting, textiles, painting, sculpture and mixed media, often presenting multidisciplinary works alongside each other. These materials and processes carry different histories and associations with labour, the domestic, repetition, cultural heritage and transformation.   

Over the years, Navabi has developed a highly personal and intellectual approach, but the power of her work lies in its grey areas. To understand her work is to slowly unravel it. ‘I don’t want the work to be solely political; that’s just one of the layers.’  

As she completes two new works for Frieze London, presented as part of a group with Don Gallery, Navabi discusses transformation as a form of survival, her fascination with ancient mythology and her own process of metamorphosis. 

Interview by Izzy Bilkus, Frieze London

Izzy Bilkus Tell me about your new work for Frieze London. 

Koushna Navabi I’m exhibiting a painting and a sculpture. The painting is a section of the seismic map of the Persian Gulf, which I’ve painted to look like it’s knitted. The sculpture is an anthropomorphic figure made from found tree trunks, Persian kilim, stitches and polished bronze. These works bring craft and canon in the same breath. Both works sound quite different, but there’s a narrative of transformation that ties them together. 

Tehran artists respond to catastrophe — and refuse to surrender to it

The city’s inaugural art month is bringing creators, galleries and collectors together as Iranians grapple with the trauma of war and unrest

At the Artists House in downtown Tehran, Parisa Abbasi’s Repair depicts a human figure fallen apart, with fragments scattered across the floor. Courtesy Najmeh Bozorgmehr and FT.

by Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran, FT

A blackened, cracked and scorched canvas hangs in Artibition Art Gallery in Tehran, its Persian inscriptions emerging through layers of soot and ash. Burnt-out candles sit before it, wax spilled across the floor.

The two-panel painting by Mojtaba Amini reflects his experience at the height of the war, when US and Israeli strikes hit Tehran’s fuel depots on March 7, sending a dark cloud over the capital, followed by toxic rainfall. The text reads: “A black chador has covered the city’s sky . . . a woman with a bottle of mineral water washes a blackened cat . . . how ominous the colour black is.” Yet Amini’s darkness is not without an exit. “I know this darkness will subside.”

The painting is part of immutable, a group exhibition and one of dozens of shows, open studios and cultural events taking place across Tehran until September 11 as part of Tehran Art Month, intended to promote the city’s visual arts. It is the first event to bring together so many of Tehran’s galleries at a time when Iranian society is grappling with the trauma of two wars in the past year and bloody unrest in January, in which thousands were killed.

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.

With My Roots

Art in exile on show at London’s Iranian Contemporary Art Biennale

Iran Herself is a Vineyard by Homa Bazrafshan. Courtesy Mall Galleries and The Conversation

by Katayoun Shahandeh, The Conversation

With Iran’s official cultural presence on the international stage increasingly uncertain, the 6th Iranian Contemporary Art Biennale in London, With My Roots, carries significance that extends well beyond the gallery walls.

Held at Mall Galleries from May 22–30, it brings together more than 100 Iranian artists from 17 countries, with over 180 works spanning painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video. Despite its scale, the exhibition feels intimate: a space where Iranian culture emerges not as a single story, but as a field of tensions, inheritances and unresolved attachments.

Iran’s withdrawal from the Venice Biennale earlier this year exposed how fragile national representation has become, at a moment when art and geopolitics are increasingly difficult to separate.

Against that silence, this biennale tells a different – and in many ways more urgent – story. It shows how Iranian art continues to circulate when official platforms falter, and why independent cultural infrastructures matter in moments of political and material crisis.

Architectural Microcosms:

An Interview with Arash Nassiri

Arash Nassiri: ‘A Bug’s Life,’ 2026, installation view at Chisenhale Gallery, London, Co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London; Fluentum, Berlin; and Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, produced by Chisenhale Gallery, photo by Andy Keate. Courtesy of the artist and Berlin Art Link

by William Kherbek, Berlin Art Link

Forms of measurement are essentially arbitrary, the “foot,” after all, is based on a human foot. The “hand,” used to measure horses in the Anglosphere, is based on a human hand. The legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, writing in his poetry collection ‘A Wolf on Watch,’ embraces the relativities of determining scale: “I measure/The depth of the lagoon/By the croaking of frogs”—a reminder that even if measurement is inherently arbitrary it need not be anthropocentric. Philosophers and artists have long evoked the perspective of non-human entities to understand various human conceptions, and scale is no exception.

Tehran-born, Berlin-based artist Arash Nassiri’s recent exhibition ‘A Bug’s Life’ at London’s Chisenhale Gallery offers a lighthearted exploration of the incongruities created by disparities in size and perspective. Nassiri’s film—not to be confused with the Pixar film that shares the same title—follows the spatial and social foibles of an otherworldly insect, a small wooden puppet, that finds itself inside one of the vast Los Angeles mansions known as “Persian Palaces.” The lavish Beverly Hills residence featured in the film was commissioned in the 1980s by Iranian expats and designed by architect Hamid Omrani, and forms part of a small architectural trend that emerged in wealthy LA neighbourhoods after the Iranian Revolution. This style of home combined the grandeur of American luxury estates with eclectic elements of European classicism, later becoming disparagingly known as “Persian Palaces” and banned by the city of Los Angeles in 2004. The results of Nassiri’s film offer novel, and affecting, musings on notions of scale as a physical and a social quantity. Lately, the artist’s work has also inevitably been subsumed into geopolitical events operating at a scale far beyond the scope of an art film and these tensions also feature in our discussion.

Refusing to Perform an Identity

Ahead of his Venice exhibition at the Canadian Pavilion, the artist, Abbas Akhavan, reflected on diasporic distance and withholding as a form of poetic practice in an interview

Cast for a Folly, 2023, installation view, ‘Curtain Call’, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 2023. Photograph by David Stjernholm. Courtesy the artist, The Third Line, Dubai and Frieze. 

Interview by Aram Moshayedi, Frieze

This conversation between curator Aram Moshayedi and artist Abbas Akhavan took place in the immediate aftermath of military strikes on Iran – an event that inevitably shapes the tenor of their exchange. While the discussion turns to Akhavan’s upcoming projects, including his Venice Biennale presentation at the Canada Pavilion (commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada) and an upcoming survey at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, it also reflects on the uneasy expectations placed on artists in moments of political crisis. Moving between questions of diasporic distance, cultural representation and the limits of artistic agency, Akhavan speaks candidly about the pressures to perform identity – and the possibility that withholding, rather than declaration, can itself be a position. 

Aram Moshayedi: I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around how to begin in light of the last few days in Iran. How to address the situation there obviously weighs upon me, but I also feel as outsiders we don’t have much authority on the subject. The tenor of this conversation would be so different if we’d spoken last week. While the focus is still you and your work, I want to ask before we begin: how do we deal with this military attack on Iran from your perspective as an Iranian Canadian artist? 

Abbas Akhavan: I currently live in Berlin. As I was walking home to get to this call, I was amazed at how everyone is going about their day as if nothing grave has happened. They’re just living their lives. And I thought: Oh yes, so am I. It’s as if it’s just another day, when obviously it isn’t. As of now, there hasn’t been time to reflect on what any of this means. Having said that, I feel like we’re still in the extended version of the ‘shock and awe’ strategy the US military used in Iraq in 2003. It is horrendous.

AM: In my case, I feel an emotional heaviness around this, but I am also apprehensive or reluctant to speak in any direct way about my perceptions or how I feel about what is happening or what will happen in Iran. Perhaps there is a similarity in how you have navigated speaking about your own identity. None of this is made any easier when there’s a war going on and you’re called upon to speak on behalf of an entire population from which you are disconnected. But it’s also a question of how to navigate these conversations, even among other Iranians, and how to talk about something without having to talk about it.

“Tarragon”—a short story

In a wartime childhood shaped by scarcity and ritual, a pair of twins become obsessed with a plant their grandfather cannot grow.

Amani Abeid, Untitled, oil on canvas, 200x150cm, 2024. Courtesy Tewas Art Gallery and the Markaz Review.

by Erfan Mojib, The Markaz Review

Grandpa didn’t think growing tarragon was possible. He grew all sorts of other herbs that filled the plastic container in the fridge year-round: basil, dill, parsley, coriander, peppermint, chives, spring onions, chilies, tiny radishes that Grandma turned into little red roses with two quick cuts of her sharp knife. When guests came over, she shaped spring onions into white hyacinths. With all those colors, Grandma’s herb container looked like the Garden of Eden.

Tarragon was different. It was exotic, hard to find, harder to grow. One spring, Ahmad, a colleague of Grandpa’s, brought him a box of tarragon from the countryside. He tried propagating the cuttings in different pots, applying every farming trick he knew. None of them took. Everyone knew he had a green thumb, but tarragon defeated him.

After that, he stopped trying. Instead, we bought tarragon from the Friday market. Merchants brought it from the south, near the warfront where Father served and which Grandma added to her Garden of Eden. She loved anything that came from the south, believing it carried Father’s smell. We examined the dark green leaves with awe. Grandpa looked at them with frustration. Grandma always saved a couple of batches of tarragon for the winter. She dried it on a big copper tray and stored it in jam jars, sealing the checkered lids to preserve their magic aroma.

And tarragon did work magic. A tiny amount was enough to turn a mediocre lamb stew sublime. On its own, it smelled divine. It was only later, after everything, that I learned it derived its name from the Greek word for dragon. A green dragon in a pot. Grandma knew its power, only adding a pinch to certain dishes. Tarragon was treated almost like saffron, with dignity and respect.

Symbolic accumulation as an act of universal resistance

Navid Azimi Sajadi at Studio la Linea Verticale

Navid Azimi Sajadi, “Untitled”, 2025, carpet, hand-woven wool tapestry with cotton base, 89×151 cm (179 with fringes). Courtesy Studio la Linea Verticale and Juliet Art Magazine.

by Emanuela Zanon, Juliet Art Magazine

Mater Ex Mater – Act I, solo exhibition by Navid Azimi Sajadi (Tehran, 1982) currently on in Bologna at Studio la Linea Verticale, is the first public configuration of a project that was meant to be more expansive and which now, in its lacunae, concretely shows the destructive consequences of every war. Geopolitical pressure made it impossible to complete the original plan, and what the public encounters is what the artist managed to bring out of Iran before the conflict closed every passage. Carpets produced under his direct supervision in the Mozafariyeh district (a historic area within the bazaar of Tabriz, renowned since the twelfth century for the trade and production of high-quality Persian carpets, now a UNESCO site), ceramics belonging to previous cycles, drawings on paper, preparatory cartoons. It is an Act I that bears its own incompleteness inscribed in the title as a structural condition, the hallmark of a cultural resistance exercised precisely in the act of bringing to safety fragments of a visual universe threatened by the violent irruption of history.

But it would be reductive to read Mater Ex Mater solely through the lens of biographical and political urgency. The project has its roots in a question that Navid Azimi Sajadi has been asking himself for years with growing insistence: what does it mean to be a contemporary Iranian artist? It is not a matter of an identity belonging to be defended nor of a folklore to be preserved, but of the ethical and existential need to understand where one’s gaze comes from, what the deep structures (symbolic, formal, philosophical) are that shape it before critical consciousness and design intention set themselves in motion.

Inside Iran’s New Sculptural Language of Memory and Desire

Hanie Rahimian and Shiva Abazariyan are an emerging Iranian artist duo from Mashhad whose collaborative practice spans sculpture, paper mache, ceramics, installation, and animation. Working between painting‑based drawing and three‑dimensional forms, they blend humor, introspection, and material experimentation to offer fresh perspectives on contemporary Iranian art.

Courtesy Emaho.

Interview by Emaho

Emaho: You both grew up in Mashhad. How has the city, its energy, and your childhood environment influenced the way you perceive the world and eventually led you toward art?

Hanieh: Shiva and I both grew up in Mashhad, a crowded city full of contradictions. Our childhood took shape in a religious and ritualistic environment, yet my family was neither religious nor traditional and had a strong interest in art. My father was particularly passionate about art, especially music. My mother was a teacher who decorated her classroom walls with drawings, and I vividly remember how she would often draw small illustrations for me in the corners of my notebooks. Those images became my first encounters with drawing and sparked my early interest in visual art.

Shiva: My family, like Hanieh’s, was not traditional or religious. They were deeply interested in art and encouraged me from a young age to pursue it. My father and brother were involved in music, and my mother painted. I was always an observer of their practices. I remember my mother drawing for me while telling stories, and sometimes my brother and I would draw directly on the walls of our home. These simple, everyday moments naturally placed me on this path.

I Won't Pretend These Missiles Are Stars

Liz Frances, Publisher at Street Noise Books, sits down with Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, to discuss the anonymously produced graphic anthology, I Won't Pretend These Missiles Are Stars, by The Cartoonist Collective in Tehran, Iran, on the 12 Days War in 2025.

Content Warning: This collection involves depictions of warfare, violence, and the trauma associated with enduring life in an active war zone under restricted civil liberties. 

Courtesy Comic Book Yeti.

by Andrew Irvin, Comic Book Yeti

Comic Book Yeti: Liz, it’s an honor to welcome you into the Yeti Cave today, though I must admit the subject of I Won’t Pretend These Missiles are Stars is an unfortunate occasion upon which to convene. I apologize for the long delay in my deliberation on putting together these questions. As the international conflict has mounted, it has been difficult to keep everything in perspective. In what way, if at all, did working on I Won’t Pretend These Missiles are Stars surrounding the 12-Day War in 2025 prepare you for the unwarranted escalation of attacks on the Iranian people by Israel and the United States in 2026?

Liz Frances: Working on I Won’t Pretend These Missiles are Stars last year helped me to appreciate how complicated the political situation is there. The two Iranian comic artists who edited the book with me wanted to be free from the oppression of the autocratic theocracy of their government, but they also recognized that the US and Israel didn’t have their best interests at heart, and wouldn’t prioritize human rights in the conflict. So, they were frightened of whatever way things would go. Back at the beginning of this year, when the Iranian government was instituting widespread internet blackouts, the editors had just sent me the finished comics for editing. And then I didn’t hear anything for more than ten days. It was literally radio silence. They ended up sending me a message a few weeks later through a relative who had managed to get to Istanbul. They wanted me to know that they were okay and were trying to stay safe. They told me that they trusted me to make whatever edits and changes needed for the book to be finished. And they urged me to do whatever I could to amplify the voices of Iranians. I took this very seriously and saw my role as even more vital at that point.

Diary of a Massacre: Iran, 2026

This anonymous diary was written during the January 2026 massacre of protesters in Tehran and published anonymously on a diaspora website right after connection was reestablished. Over the course of eight days, it narrates the unknowability of those days as the horror was beginning to unfold.

The Persian ironwood tree, harbinger of spring / Photo by alessandrozocc / Adobe Stock. Courtesy WLT 

We bore the ardor of love in our chests.

—Ezzat Ebrahim-Nejad, “Remember Us”

Editor’s Note

by Daniel Simon, WLT

In the current issue of WLT, “Diary of a Massacre: Iran, 2026,” translated by poupeh missaghi, presents a stark reminder of the stakes involved in bearing witness, whether through literature, journalism, art, or street protest. The author kept her diary during the January 2026 massacre of protesters in Iran and published it on a diaspora website soon thereafter. Such eyewitness accounts remind us that civilians bear the brunt of every war, doubly so when repressive regimes crack down on every form of internal dissent.

Out of fear for her safety, the diarist published her journal anonymously. Throughout, she refers to individuals by their first initial; since the United States and Israel fomented war on Iran on February 28, many Iranians, when talking to Western media outlets—if they manage to circumvent the near-total internet blackout—ask that not even their initials be used. The diarist’s mother, speaking in Azeri instead of Persian, tells her that one doctor in a single hospital signed ninety-three death certificates—for men, women, and children—on the night of January 9. “My mother assumes that calls are being listened to,” the diarist writes, “and perhaps she imagines that whoever is listening cannot understand her mother tongue. My mother speaks in her mother tongue also whenever she is in mourning. ‘Biz chok jeffa chakmishik,’ she says. ‘Biz chok tahhje melatik’ (We are a people who have suffered greatly. We are a people left alone).”

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.