Who Can I Dance With?

From sneaking into underground basements in Tehran [...] to learning to dance with almost no words in Northern California, I had done everything I could.

“Dancing Couple (Tanzpaar)”, by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Courtesy Guernica.

by Arash Dabestani, Guernica

After the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the rise of Islamists under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, dancing and singing were banned by his decree. People were divided: Khomeini’s supporters believed they could see the Ayatollah’s image on the moon, while others, by contrast, were captivated by Michael Jackson’s invention of the moonwalk.

All the dance clubs were repurposed after the revolution. One former Tehranian nightclub and restaurant-bar, Chattanooga, was well-known and featured in many films. But after the revolution, it became a storage place; its doors and walls all plastered over, it was now filled from floor to ceiling with cables and wires. This was my workplace for years. I would walk through tangled spools to the back of the hall, where I’d sit in a small room behind a computer, doing accounting for the company that sold the wires around me. There was no sign of music, and no sign of dancers. The only smells were of plastic and dust.

Tape players existed with the justification that they were for listening to the Quran or religious prayers. The Hezbollahi—religious vigilantes who acted as moral enforcers—would set up checkpoints on the streets and ask to pop the trunks of vehicles to look for good speakers or sound systems. It was easier than checking inside houses. If someone had a tape player that was clearly high quality—suggesting it could play non-religious music—they would stab its surface with knives.

In order to stay safe, families who didn’t align with the government would hang up thick curtains during their parties, so the insides of their homes couldn’t be seen by the Hezbollahi. They would nail rugs to the walls so the sound wouldn’t escape. One or two people would be stationed outside the garden or house to warn others if any officers showed up. There was always an older sober person at the party keeping watch, ready to pay off the authorities if needed so the gathering could go on unhindered. Others were in charge of hiding alcoholic drinks—possession of which could lead to lashes or imprisonment.

“to arrive is never to arrive”

Skyline’s art gallery explores themes of displacement and reclamation

Guest artists present ‘to arrive is never to arrive,’ an exhibition examining immigration and identity through art

Woven pillar by artist Sanaz Safanasab showing intricate details and weaves in the form of an eye hiding within the cloth. Courtesy The Skyline View.

Aileen Bucog, The Skyline View

The Skyline College Art Gallery held the opening reception for its latest exhibition, “to arrive is never to arrive,” on Feb. 7 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Art by Javier Roberto Carlos, Lorena Molina, and Sanaz Safanasab cohesively explores themes of political rupture, displacement and reclamation in the context of immigration. 

Art history professor Kathy Zarur runs the art gallery, typically curating exhibitions herself; this time, she invited guest curators to put a show together.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity to bring in new people,” Zarur said. “People who know the curators and the artists will come and pay closer attention. By bringing in guest curators, we’re highlighting this gallery even more.” 

The opening reception greeted visitors with opening remarks from Zarur and Off Hours — a curatorial collective that spotlights emerging Bay Area artists — who introduced the featured artists.

Zarur’s gallery practicum class and Off Hours installed and curated the exhibition together.

Katherine Jemima Hamilton, Shaelyn Hanes and Ebti — all working and practicing artists — formed the collective in November 2023, after first meeting at California College of the Arts.

“Shaelyn [Hanes] and I were in the curatorial practice program at CCA, which no longer exists. Ebti was in the MFA [masters of fine arts] program,” Hamilton said. “We’ve always curated in other people’s spaces. That gives us a lot of unique challenges, but also opportunities to work with artists in lots of different types of ways.”

Forbidden Music:

Iranian Musicians Push Back Against the Islamic Republic

A Conversation with TarantisT, Justina, and DJ Ali Pink

Issue #74 - The Protest Issue with Kathleen Hanna and Bartees Strange 

Improv session. Tehran, Iran. 2013. Photograph: Jai Brodie. Courtesy Jai Brodie and The Guardian.

by Lily Moayeri, Under The Radar Magazine

Imagine a society where music is forbidden. A society where listening to music is an offense punishable by imprisonment and lashings. Accessing music is only possible through illegal means. Sharing music is a risk you take with your life. This dystopian-like society is not the stuff of an extreme YA novel, it’s what’s been happening in Iran for the last 47 years, under the dictatorial rule of the Islamic Republic.

It hasn’t always been this way in Iran. An ancient civilization going back to the Persian Empire from 550 B.C., Iran was built on the arts. Persian poets Ferdowsi, Rumi, Hafez, and Khayyam have been translated and read in multiple languages for over 1000 years. Traditional Persian instruments tar (lute), santur (dulcimer), chang (harp), and ney (flute) have been played for centuries.

More recently, prior to the Islamic Republic’s takeover, popular Iranian musicians ruled the airwaves in the country, as did Western artists such as Donnie & Marie. Music stores stocked cassette albums from Europe and the U.S. and did excellent business. Nightclubs, cabarets, and discos featured live entertainment and the hottest tunes, both Western and Iranian. All were packed.

The extreme turnaround after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, which bases its constitution, in large part, on the most fundamentalist interpretation of Sharia law, that is the religious law of Islam as commanded by God, came down particularly hard on music. Initially, all music was banned, but Iranians’ love of music, and the need for it, couldn’t be denied.

Iranian Artists Keep the Spirit of “Woman, Life, Freedom” Alive

Over three years after the suspicious death of Jina Mahsa Amini sparked a nationwide protest movement in Iran, artists continue to fuel creative resistance.

A digital illustration by Forouzan Safari echoes the defiant spirit of Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising in September 2022. Courtesy Roshi Rouzbehani and In These Times.

Alessandra Bajec, In These Times 

The 2022 ​“Woman, Life, Freedom” protests erupted in Iran following the shocking death of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini, in police custody. Like many Iranians in the diaspora, illustrator Roshi Rouzbehani was filled with grief, rage and a profound duty to speak out. She felt compelled to create art that echoed what so many were experiencing, and to share the images online to help bring global attention to her people’s struggle.

“Art became both a personal coping mechanism and a form of activism for me,” Rouzbehani tells In These Times. Now based in the UK, she left Iran in 2011 to seek safety from political pressures.

In the year of the women-led uprising, the Iranian regime’s security forces killed hundreds of protesters and threatened the lives of numerous journalists, and detained, tortured and persecuted thousands more. Artists, musicians and cultural workers in Iran — particularly those involved in protest art and human rights activism — continue to face escalating repression, including arbitrary arrests, jail sentences, concert bans and strict censorship.

“Raised fists, flowing scarves and bold female figures,” Rouzbehani says. ​“All these elements reflect the movement’s core spirit: autonomy, resistance and hope.”

‘Octogone’

 Interview. Chalisée Naamani

Protest, fashion history, training equipment, resistance, children’s toys, the search for identity, and the cultural circulation of images. Chalisée Naamani’s ‘Octogone’ is currently on view at Kunsthalle Wien until 6 April 2026; the exhibition moves fluidly between personal and collective histories; clothing, images, and gestures become carriers of ideology, belonging, and power.

Chalisée Naamani, Who claims love? (Detail), 2025, Exhibition view Palais de Tokyo, 2025. Courtesy Ciaccia Levi, Paris/Mailand and Les Nouveaux Riches. © Bildrecht, Wien 2026. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

Interview by Kristina Deska Nikolić (KDN), Les Nouveaux Riches

The exhibition space of the Kunsthalle Wien feels as if it is framing your works. The built–in structure of the changing room, and lockers with mirrors became stations for your work to lean and hang. How you embraced the space and how the idea and the Zurkhaneh (House of Strength) is visible in the exhibition design.

The exhibition ‘Octogone’ first took place in 2025 at Palais de Tokyo, also titled ‘Octogone’. The exhibition traveled to Vienna and is now on view with new works I did specifically for the show here in Austria. When I was invited to do a show in Palais de Tokyo, the space that was given to me had an octagonal shape, which immediately reminded me of my grandfather, who was a wrestler and a boxing fighter.

The art of resistance:

Iranian photographer Ayna Moazzen on identity and building cultural bridges

Copyright Courtesy of Ayna Moazzen and Euronews.

by Saida Rustamova & Tokunbo Salako, Euronews

Iranian contemporary artist Ayna Moazzen, lives between Italy, Azerbaijan and Gulf countries and seeks to turn her transnational experience into a form of cultural dialogue and resistance against the Tehran regime's deadly crackdown on anti-government protests.

Living and working between Italy, Azerbaijan and the Gulf countries, Iranian contemporary artist Ayna Moazzen sees art as both a cultural bridge and a form of resistance amidst the political and social tensions in her country of origin.

Moazzen, who holds a master's degree in art history, translates her lived experience of movement and memory into visual art. Her art bridges visual traditions from late antiquity to contemporary times.

Although her career is transnational, she says her artistic language remains deeply rooted in Iran. “No matter where I am, Iran is always with me. It shapes my instincts, my symbols and my sensitivity – it’s the emotional language I think in.”

A Bug’s Life

New London exhibition uses architecture to explore the experiences of Iran’s American diaspora

Arash Nassiri’s film installation at London’s Chisenhale Gallery uses an abandoned “Persian Palace” to reflect on the lives of Iranians who have settled in LA and elsewhere in the West

Arash Nassiri’s film, A Bug’s Life, sees its insect protagonist experience disorientation and ambiguity as it journeys through a Los Angeles mansion. Courtesy of Arash Nassiri and The Art Newspaper.

by Cyrus Naji, The Art Newspaper

In Arash Nassiri’s new moving-image commission, an insect puppet drags itself across an empty marble floor, cast in eerie blue evening light. The scene is diffused through an enormous frosted-glass cubicle, refracting and distorting the images.

That sense of distortion pervades the Tehran-born, Berlin-based Nassiri’s first institutional solo exhibition, A Bug’s Life, which opened last weekend at London’s Chisenhale Gallery—and comprises a film set within a sculptural installation. The film follows its insect protagonist on a journey of discovery through a cavernous mansion in Los Angeles, its scenes filled with a sense of disorientation and ambiguity that mirrors the experience of those who are separated from their homeland.

The empty mansion is a “Persian Palace”—a unique mutation of Iranian and French Empire architectural styles that took off in Iran in the heady years of Iran’s oil wealth in the 1960s and 1970s. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iranians scattered around Europe and North America; Nassiri himself grew up in Switzerland. Some of the wealthier among them recreated the architectural styles of Tehran in Los Angeles, forming what Nassiri calls “a free-form collage of America and Roman and Greek antiquity”.

Reports of Artists Killed by Iranian Regime Draw Outrage and Grief

Sculptor Mehdi Salahshour and filmmaker Javad Ganji are among the members of Iran’s creative community reportedly killed during anti-government protests.

by Isa Farfan, Hyperallergic

As accounts emerge from Iran's deadly crackdown on dissent this month, reports that government forces have shot and killed artists, including sculptor Mehdi Salahshour and filmmaker Javad Ganji, have added to growing international outrage.

Amid an ongoing state-initiated internet blackout in Iran, reporters and human rights groups are scrambling to account for the number of protesters killed and arrested by the Iranian regime since opposition demonstrations began in December.

According to eyewitness reports, government forces have shot indiscriminately at protesters, killing over 2,400 protesters, estimated by the United States-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. The group also reported that forces arrested 18,137 people as part of the crackdown.

Salahshour, a 50-year-old sculptor and father, and Ganji, a 39-year-old television and film director, were among those massacred, according to the Norway-based Iranian Kurdish Hengaw Organization for Human Rights. Ganji's killing was also confirmed by the Iranian Independent Filmmakers Association (IIFMA), as reported by Deadline.

Iranian Art Communities Respond to Political Unrest

Protestors in Tehran, 2026. Via social media. Courtesy picture alliance/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock and ArtAsiaPacific.

by Aisha Traub Chan, ArtAsiaPacific

Mass antigovernment demonstrations have erupted across Iran over the past two weeks. According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), the Iranian authorities’ aggressive clampdown has led to at least 500 deaths and over 10,600 arrests. As the turmoil continues to unfold, Iranian artists are denouncing the Islamic regime’s violence and expressing their support for the protestors.

The rallies, which began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar on December 28, 2025 over widespread inflation, have grown into the largest wave of civil unrest in the country since 2022, when Mahsa Jina Amini’s death in morality-police custody sparked public outrage. Following the government’s deadly response, officials enacted a nationwide internet blackout on January 8, cutting off domestic communication routes, as well as barricading the population from contact with the rest of the world.

Tehran-based filmmaker Jafar Panahi, whose work is banned in Iran, is among the flood of artists and cultural figures who are using social media to denounce the Iranian government. Panahi’s latest film, It Was Just an Accident (2025)—which explores themes of trauma, political oppression, and the collective struggle for liberation—marks his first creative project since being released from Evin Prison in Tehran three years ago, where he was incarcerated for disseminating anti-state propaganda. He issued a joint statement alongside filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, who fled to Germany in 2024 after state authorities sentenced him to eight years in prison as well as flogging. The post reads: “In recent days, following the presence of millions of Iranians in the streets protesting against the Islamic Republic, the government has once again resorted to its most blatant tools of repression.” Further addressing the internet shutdown, they called on international communities to “immediately find ways to facilitate access to vital information in Iran by enabling communication platforms.”

Driving in the Dark

This piece was written before Iran imposed an internet blackout on 8 January.

by Raha Nik-Andish, London Review of Books

Six months ago I thought about buying a car, for reasons not of convenience but of necessity. My income as a freelance university lecturer in Iran barely pays for my daily commute. I thought I could drive at night for the ride‑hailing service Snapp! to cover my living expenses. I had enough savings to buy a hatchback Saipa Quik – but then its price went up 66 per cent.

I wasn’t able to buy a car but I have started driving for Snapp! anyway. One‑third of my earnings goes to the car’s owner, Snapp! takes a commission and I pay for wear and tear on the car as well as fuel.

One night I picked up a pair of estate agents. ‘Is working with Snapp! profitable?’ one of them asked. ‘Everyone seems to be doing it.’

I said I was just starting.

‘What this government has done to Iran’s economy,’ he replied, ‘no enemy could have accomplished. They frighten the people. So money goes into gold and coins. Then inflation rises and the gold is dumped back into the market. It’s a dirty economic game to empty people’s pockets.’

I asked about the housing market. ‘It’s not about having money,’ he said. ‘It’s about instability. Nobody dares to sell or buy. Prices can shift so fast that you might not even be able to buy back your own home.’ I have heard similar sentiments from shopkeepers, office workers and government employees.

“Tahmina”—a story from Iran

In this short story translated from Persian, an ordinary day swiftly — and brutally — changes course, with lasting implications.

Amir Fallah, “For Those Who Fear Tomorrow, acrylic on canvas, 2022. Courtesy Artist and The Markaz Review.

by Abdollah Nazari, Translated from Persian by Salar Abdoh, The Markaz Review

She lingered at the threshold of the entrance to the building, uneasily shifting the groceries in one hand while holding onto the sleeping child with the other. Another half step inside and she could hear tentative steps behind her. She turned. Her daughter, in school uniform, was gazing at her with a fearful look that Tahmina hadn’t time just then to question.

“Hurry,” she called to the girl. “Come take your little brother off my hands.” She loosened the tight hold she had on her chador so she could hand over the boy.

Masume managed a weak salaam before taking the boy from her mother. “Maman,” she mumbled meekly.

But Tahmina was already hurrying down the hallway. Everything in her body ached today. The groceries seemed to double in weight the closer she got to the apartment. But then something in what she’d noticed in her daughter’s face made her slow down. She hesitated and turned, “Where’s your brother? Where’s Alireza?”

The girl uttered another “Maman,” and then burst into tears. “Alireza didn’t come for me after his school. They say he went to fight the big boys in fifth grade.”

Tahmina set the groceries down. Her back was throbbing. The outside light of December leaking into the building was weak and made the hallway feel more claustrophobic than ever.

Returning the gaze:

 Hoda Afshar investigates a colonial obsession

Working with an archive of photographs made over a century ago, the artist folds the gaze back onto the Eurocentric lens that shaped the images in The Fold

© The Fold, Hoda Afshar. Courtesy 1854 | British Journal of Photography

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

In 1918 Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, a French psychiatrist and photographer, travelled to Morocco for a second time (his first was in 1915, when recovering from a war wound). While there, he took thousands of photographs of veiled Moroccan women. These images attempted to fulfil a certain fantasy, one that can be attributed to a French colonial imagination, and were used by de Clérambault to support psychoanalytic theories around covering and desire. Though de Clérambault was making work over 100 years ago, this French fascination with veiled Muslim women remains. Since 2010, France has banned the niqab and burqa in public places, and in June 2023, the Constitutional Council upheld the right of the French Football Federation and similar bodies to ban hijabs (or any other overt religious symbols) during matches. 

Iranian-born, Melbourne-based Hoda Afshar came across de Clérambault’s images during her research at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, in Paris. He was different to photographers she had previously come across in other archives, she says, in the sense that he was fascinated by the coverings, or ‘hayek’, rather than the naked bodies of North African women. He became seemingly obsessed with the hayek, in fact, making almost 30,000 images over two years in Morocco. 

After returning to France, de Clérambault continued to photograph the hayek, using models or mannequins to display the coverings. When he realised he was losing his eyesight in 1934, he took a gun and killed himself in front of a mirror and, Afshar explains, his body was surrounded by mannequins dressed in hayek, piles of fabric, and boxes full of handprinted images of women in the coverings.

Art Gallery of St. Albert highlights the immigrant experience

Visual artist Mohammad Hossein Abbasi depicts the process immigrants face in rebuilding their lives in a new country built around a different culture, social norms and political system

Mohammad Hossein Abbasi's collection of art on the immigrant experience is currently on display at the Art Gallery of St. Albert until Jan. 31, 2026. Courtesy Art Gallery of St. Albert and St. Albert Gazette.

by Anna Borowiecki, St. Albert Gazette

In its final exhibition of the season, the Art Gallery of St. Albert (AGSA) launches The Home by Edmonton-based visual artist Mohammad Hossein Abbasi.

The exhibition features the slow and difficult process and emotions immigrants face while integrating into a new culture and a new land without losing their sense of self.

“The Home’s conversational theme and title is a search for belonging, stability and understanding in a new place and how that changes over time,” said Emily Baker, AGSA curator.

The Iranian artist originally lived in Tehran and trained as a civil engineer while at the same time studying painting. Abbasi and his wife moved to Edmonton in 2021 so he could work towards an MFA in painting at the University of Alberta.

“It was also hard to make ends meet even though both he and his wife had good jobs, and it (political situation) was becoming more precarious in Tehran,” Baker said. Currently, Abbasi is employed as a graphic designer and teaches painting.

She describes Abbasi as an artist whose visual work speaks with intellectual ease.

150 Years of Iranian Graphic Design

Courtesy The Daily Heller, Print Magazine.

by Steven Heller, The Daily Heller, Print Magazine

Various books, exhibits and at least one magazine attest to the innovative graphic design and typography that originated Iran, notably and paradoxically, following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. There has yet to be a formal history that chronicles the over 200-year legacy of Persian/Iranian graphics until now. The History of Graphic Design in Iran, edited and organized by Majid Abbassi, an Iranian-born, Toronto-based designer, writer and editor, fills the void. A long time coming, this is a two-volume visual encyclopedic reflection of Iran’s graphic design heritage—”a country with millennia of cultural and artistic history, where some of the most influential examples of graphic design emerged,” says Abbassi.

The content is divided into two main sections. The first focuses on practitioners and presents 182 designers, illustrators, calligraphers and graphic artists from the Qājār dynasty, 1794 to 1925, to the present; the second section concentrates on topics related to graphic design, encompassing 84 thematic entries. Additionally, the book examines the roles of organizations, institutions, governmental and private companies, advertising agencies, graphic design studios, publications and assorted media that have shaped the field.

The scope of the book spans from 1871 (1250 in the Solar Hijri calendar) to 2021 (1400 SH), with references to earlier periods, particularly regarding writing systems, the establishment of Dar al-Funun, and early visual documents. With the advent of printing and reproduction in Iran, graphic design evolved in parallel with the country’s political, social, economic and cultural transformations. “However, this presentation does not imply endorsement or promotion of their content,” Abbassi insists, referring to the revolutionary propaganda that is included. “This book is not merely a compilation of designers’ works; it is a celebration of an important chapter in the history of Iranian art and culture—one that has gained international recognition over the past two decades.”

‘Identity is never fixed. It’s layered, constantly shifting’

An interview with Iranian-American artist Soraya Sharghi

Sharghi’s journey reveals a constant dialogue between discipline and rebellion

Soraya Sharghi, ‘Rising with the Song of Nymphs,’ 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 152,4 x 236,2 cm (60 x 93 in). Photo courtesy of the artist and Global Voices.

by Omid Memarian, Global Voices

In her most recent exhibition, “Sculpture and Painting,” presented at 24 Avenue Matignon in Paris during Art Basel’s October 2025 week, Iranian-American artist Soraya Sharghi gathered recent bronze, ceramic, and painting works in a single, immersive environment. 

In this presentation, Sharghi unveiled a luminous universe where mythology, memory, and material intertwine. Through hybrid figures that seem to rise from fire and color, she explores the feminine not as muse but as a generative force. Works such as “Rising with the Song of Nymphs” and her hand-shaped ceramic guardians create a continuum between painting and sculpture, where myth is reimagined as a language of survival and rebirth.

Born in 1988 in Tehran and now based in New York, Sharghi studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she began experimenting simultaneously with painting, sculpture, and installation. As a child, she invented elaborate stories and imaginary characters for her younger sister, narratives that later became the foundation of her visual universe. “Imagination comes naturally in childhood,” she says, “and I’ve made sure never to lose that. It still drives the way I work today.”

Her art, she explains, is a form of reclamation and protection: “Growing up in Iran, imagination became my refuge. Surrealism was not just an artistic influence; it was a way of surviving reality.” In her visual lexicon, myth becomes autobiography; every hybrid heroine is a self-created guardian of endurance, shaped by restriction, migration, and the continuous negotiation of womanhood.

Sharghi’s journey reveals a constant dialogue between discipline and rebellion. Her intricate surfaces, radiant chromatic palette, and densely worked compositions echo, in spirit, the emotionally charged figuration of artists like Niki de Saint Phalle, Hayv Kahraman and Emma Talbot, who likewise weave myth, textural pattern, and feminine subjectivity into contemporary narratives. Yet Sharghi’s voice remains unmistakably her own — unflinchingly personal, intellectually grounded, and spiritually charged.

Speaking of her multi-material approach, Sharghi says, “Each material carries its own energy and teaches me something new… together they form a map of my spiritual evolution.” In this interview with Global Voices, Soraya reflects on imagination, hybridity, mythmaking, the politics and poetics of the female body, and the alchemy of clay, fire, and color that continues to shape her expanding universe.

‘Divine Comedy’

Iranian Filmmaker Ali Asgari on Satire, Censorship and Absurdities Behind ‘Divine Comedy’: ‘You Show How Silly and Stupid the Rules Are’

Courtesy of Ali Asgari and Variety.

by Essie Assibu, Variety

Iranian filmmaker Ali Asgari has long explored the quiet tensions and bureaucratic pressures of everyday life in Iran, from his acclaimed shorts to festival recognized features like “Disappearance,” “Until Tomorrow,” and “Terrestrial Verses.” In competition at the Doha Film Festival, he arrives with his latest work, “Divine Comedy,” which premiered earlier this year in Venice’s Horizons sidebar, and pushes his familiar themes into more overtly comedic territory.

Starring director Bahman Ark as Bahram, the story centers on a mid-career filmmaker whose entire body of Turkish-Azeri-language work has never been screened in Iran. When his newest film is once again rejected by cultural authorities, he joins forces with his sharp-witted producer, Sadaf (Sadaf Asgari), to stage an underground guerrilla screening in Tehran. What begins as a simple act of defiance becomes a darkly funny journey through red tape, cultural gatekeeping, and the range of anxieties facing any artist determined to create freely.

The film is a multinational co-production between Iran, Italy, France, Germany and Turkey, with international sales handled by Goodfellas.

Daughter BWASM review

filthy pot shots from a bad mum and her AI offspring

Pilar Corrias, London

The Iranian-born US artist cleverly uses AI-generated robot children to show she has had enough of women being treated like mechanical automatons for childbirth and care

Childish and confrontational … Tala Madani’s DWASM (Teddy). Photograph: Fredrik Nilsen Studio/Tala Madani; courtesy the artist,The Guardian and Pilar Corrias, London.

by Eddy Frankel, The Guardian

What’s the opposite of perfect? Well, shit, according to Tala Madani. For years now the Iranian-born US artist has been painting Shit Mom, a fetid smear of a human figure intended as a subversion of feminine, maternal ideals. And in the painter’s latest show, Shit Mom has a new child in her care: she has adopted an AI daughter.

The rub is immediately obvious: the AI robot represents perfection; Shit Mom its impossibility. As they interact across the canvases, the gleaming mechanical perfection of the daughter – born motherless, hence the show’s title “Daughter BWASM”, or Born Without a Shit Mom – gets streaked with smudges of filthy brown. The more the mum cares for her daughter, the more she taints her. The robot can’t avoid getting moulded in her mother’s image.

The show is one of the first instances of AI being used as both tool and subject in a big London gallery. Madani treats AI like a component of modern society that has to be dealt with, accepted and adapted, rather than just some fancy new toy to gawp at and play with.

Soft Edge of the Blade Vol. 3

After acclaimed editions in London (Frieze No.9 Cork Street, 2022) and Toronto (Zaal Art Gallery, 2023), “Soft Edge of the Blade” arrives in Dubai for its third and most ambitious chapter. The exhibition gathers artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, and hybrid media to examine violence in its many forms—visible and invisible, personal and collective.

Mehrdad Mohebali, Untitled, 2025, Acrylic on canvas. 130 x 331 cm. Courtesy the artist, Leila Heller Gallery and Dreamideamachine Art View.

by Efi Michalarou, Dreamideamachine Art View

The exhibition “Soft Edge of the Blade Vol. 3” expands beyond the familiar narratives of war and political oppression to address subtler forms of “soft” violence: migration, diaspora, patriarchy, family structures, gender, censorship, and the weaponization of language in digital spaces. By situating these inquiries within the Middle East, the exhibition highlights how history, tradition, and memory can themselves carry traces of violence.

Audiences are invited to engage with works that oscillate between the symbolic and the visceral, asking not only how violence manifests but whether we recognize it at all. In the words of Elie Wiesel, whose reflection guides the project: “Questions unite people. It is the answers that divide them.”

From London to Toronto, “Soft Edge of the Blade” has traced the contours of violence across continents. Now, in Dubai, the series unfolds its most expansive act yet. Here, in a region whose very name—“the Middle East”—is entangled with a vocabulary of conflict, the exhibition turns inward. It asks: what if the violence we dread is already within us, hidden in memory, ornament, tradition, even beauty?

The artists assembled speak in many tongues—painting, sculpture, photography, hybrid media—yet their voices converge on a single question: how does violence seep softly into our lives? Their works move between intimacy and rupture, between the symbolic and the visceral, touching on censorship, domesticity, resistance, and the fragile architectures of identity.

Translating Toward Possibility:

Sarah Faux Interviews Mariam Rahmani

by The Common

Friends for over a decade, MARIAM RAHMANI and SARAH FAUX have been connecting for years about their respective artistic practices. They recently spoke over Zoom for The Common: Sarah from her painting studio, and Mariam from her office in Vermont. In the following conversation, they discuss Mariam’s novel, Liquid, published earlier this year, which centers a queer Muslim woman who navigates 100 dates in one summer. They speak on how translating others’ work has served Mariam’s own voice in writing, and how messiness and uncertainty are at the heart of good literature.

Sarah Faux (SF): It’s very special to get this opportunity to interview you after you interviewed me at my painting exhibition in April! We had the unique opportunity to release two projects simultaneously, and now we are about six months post-release of your excellent novel, Liquid. I’m curious how you’re feeling a few months later?

Mariam Rahmani (MR): It’s actually a relief that I’m not thinking about it that much anymore. I had a really busy summer. I had to turn in another translation, a full book manuscript. I also got back to an old book I had buried, and researched a new book I started two years ago, soon after Liquid got acquired. It’s kind of nice, because my mind is occupied with new questions. And now this novel exists in the world and has a life of its own. I think that the beauty of the relationship between an author and a reader is the fact that they will never meet and never speak to each other, and really never know of each other outside of that work.

SF: Well, except for us right now. But I get that, and also at the same time, do you feel like your book might be filling a void that you observed in literary fiction? Is Liquid directed towards a specific reader that might otherwise be neglected?

“Beginnings”

The late Iranian American artist’s exhibition exemplified how he expanded the Eurocentric parameters of abstraction.

Installation view of MANOUCHER YEKTAI’s “Beginnings” at Karma Gallery, Los Angeles, 2025. Courtesy Karma Gallery and ArtAsiaPacific.

by Liz Hirsch, ArtAsiaPacific

“Beginnings,” curated by writer and editor Negar Azimi, was the most comprehensive survey to date of early works by Manoucher Yektai (1921–2019), an artist who belonged to the New York School yet never quite fit its mythology of white male heroism. The Iranian-born painter trained in Tehran, New York, and Paris before settling in New York by 1948, bringing a sensibility shaped by multiple European modernisms (Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism) alongside his native cultural heritage. Unfolding chronologically across two large rooms, the exhibition featured paintings made between 1948 and 1969 that exemplify how Yektai transformed Surrealist biomorphism into a muscular material language. What emerged was the story of an artist expanding the Eurocentric parameters of abstraction in the US. 

Untitled (1948), with whites and blues punctuated by sienna, greeted visitors near the entrance. The curving forms depicted in this work are edged with tooth-like projections. Though the white patches appear smooth at first, a closer look reveals a textured, striated surface, recalling a fine comb that has passed through wet plaster. Hung nearby was Untitled (1949), a smaller, kite-shaped tableau with compressed swirls of purple, orange, and black, reminiscent of intricately patterned Persian carpets as well as the fluid, amoeba-like imagery of Joan Miró and Jean Arp. Two decades before American artists like Ellsworth Kelly or Frank Stella produced their atypically shaped canvases, Yektai treated the edge as a charged, sculptural boundary.

Noble/Savage

Ali Banisadr’s Mesmerizing Paintings Make Sense of Chaos 

Ali Banisadr, installation view of “Noble/Savage” at Olney Gleason, 2025. Photo by Charlie Rubin. Courtesy of Olney Gleason and Artsy.

by Maxwell Rabb, Artsy

Ali Banisadr’s childhood in Tehran was marked by violence. At the start of the Iran-Iraq War, which broke out in 1980, he was only four years old. “As a child, I was trying to understand this chaos,” he told me during a recent visit to his studio in Brooklyn. “The most abstract thing to make sense of for me was living in Iran during the war.”

That sensory overload became the foundation of his visual language, informed in large part by the artist’s synesthesia. Making art, he told me, was a way to impose order on disorder—to “make sense out of the sounds,” he explained. Four decades later, Banisadr, now 49, lives in New York, where he continues to try to understand the world through his hyperactive compositions. Layers of rough, energetic brushstrokes collide with flashes of color that hum against each other, evoking a similar dissonance to what he experienced as a child. His canvases are visually overwhelming yet remain governed by some internal logic, like a piece of music.

This push-pull relationship between order and chaos lies at the center of “Noble/Savage,” Banisadr’s solo show inaugurating New York’s Olney Gleason gallery (previously known as Kasmin). The show brings together the Iranian American artist’s newest paintings and a suite of bronze sculptures, his first in this medium. This body of work extends Banisadr’s lifelong pursuit of making sense of confusing, often contradictory human experiences.

In 1988, his family relocated from Tehran to San Francisco, where he started making graffiti among a community of artists. There, he was inspired by other artists using the medium to create sociopolitical critique. For example, in our interview, Banisadr name-checked Barry McGee, who “was making commentary about things that you were seeing in San Francisco,” referring to the gentrification of the city over the years.

nameless

Nairy Baghramian at WIELS — nameless brings together several previously unseen bodies of work in dialogue with the post-industrial architecture.

Installation view, photography by Eline Willaert. Courtesy SLEEK.

by Nisha Merit, SLEEK

Iranian-born, Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian has spent decades forging a singular sculptural vocabulary that draws from dance, theatre, fashion, architecture and the history of sculpture itself. Since 1984 she has lived and worked in Berlin, developing a practice that moves across sculpture, spatial installation, photography, and drawing.

Her exhibition nameless, which opened last Saturday at WIELS in Brussels, examines the forces that shape the displacement and statelessness of objects. Baghramian reflects on the precarious condition of works that exist perpetually “in between” – liberated from fixed classifications or limiting environments. She conjures an urgency for a sculptural mode of existence outside the rigidity of language, codes, and names – a concern that resonates well beyond today’s geopolitical crises. For Baghramian, sculpture is not simply an object but an expanded way of understanding the world.

Raising their Voices: the Iranian artists fighting back

In Iran, women are forbidden to sing in public. A handful of Berlin’s Iranian artists are fighting back with rebellious records.

Faravaz Farvadin / Makar Artemev. Courtesy The Berliner.

by Dan Cole, The Berliner

In 2016, then-26-year-old Faravaz Farvardin was arrested in Tehran. She’d violated one of the country’s many restrictions on what women are allowed to do: she sang in public. The musician faced a year behind bars.

This May, Faravaz – who has since claimed asylum in Berlin – put out her debut album, Azadi. She performed the record live to a sold-out crowd at SO36, in what was billed as “A Night of Musical Rebellion”.

Since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, women have been banned from singing solo in public, as part of a wider framework of restrictions imposed on women’s rights. In the decades that followed, many Iranians left the country in search of greater freedom and opportunity abroad. Germany, and Berlin in particular, has become home to a growing Iranian diaspora. And over the past year, several Berlin-based Iranian women have released records that reflect not only their musical heritage but also the ongoing struggles faced by women in Iran. These migrant artists have created a cross-cultural musical scene, forging new sub-genres of Persian sound and embodying the city’s electronic pop and liberal output.

“We are all exilers, doing something we cannot do in our home country,” says Faravaz, who goes by her first name as an artist. Back in Iran, authorities continue to crack down on female artists who find ways to share their voices. “Every time I thought about doing something crazy, I would just look around and see someone doing something crazier than me,” she says.

Iran and Art in a Cage

A century of cultural rupture and decline

Golestan palace, glory of Iran’s rich arth history. Courtesy Asia Sentinel.

by Amirreza Etasi, Asia Sentinel

This is an autopsy of a century of rupture and decline in Iran’s authentic arts, a decline not built on natural evolution but the product of three successive waves of structural, political, and ideological interventions by ruling governments.

It is a decline built on tragedy. Iran boasts one of the world’s richest art heritages, spanning millennia and encompassing disciplines like architecture, textiles, calligraphy, miniature painting, metalworking, and pottery. It encompasses ancient monumental structures like Persepolis, intricate Safavid-era tilework, Persian carpets, and detailed engraving and marquetry.

They are now in a cage, sometimes adorned with the golden bars of modernization and at other times with the steel walls of ideology. Over the past century, the state has become the primary patron, buyer, and commissioner of art, destroying the independent market and suppressing creativity. The artist is forced to answer to power, not to society.

The direct consequence is a devastating brain drain. The continuous exodus of artistic elites has hollowed out the country’s creative body. This is not a “brain circulation” that enriches the homeland upon return; it is a one-way flight. While this exodus has created a vibrant diaspora—a “second bloodstream” of Iranian art in the pop studios of Los Angeles and the galleries of Paris and New York—it severs the artists’ organic connection to their primary source of inspiration and depletes the cultural capital within Iran.

Real State

Interview-In Conversation with Shirana Shahbazi About Her Solo Show in Emkan Gallery

Shirana Shahbazi, Schaedel-01-2001, c-print on aluminium, 90 × 70, 2007. Image courtesy the artist and Collection Pictet. 

by Kimia Akhtari, Darz

Kimia Akhtari (KA): Tell us about your first encounter with photography. What led you to choose this medium?

Shirana Shahbazi (SS): I originally wanted to become a photojournalist — that’s how it all began. I had the usual expectations that came with that aspiration, but I soon realized how idealistic that thinking was. That realization pushed me to re-examine my artistic language and what I wanted from photography.

KA: If you were to define your artistic journey in a few stages, what would they be?

SS: During my studies, I entered with the idea of photojournalism and left with a completely different approach. Understanding and articulating that shift was, in itself, a major question for me. My thesis marked the first concrete step in my practice. After that, I decided what paths I didn’t want to continue and began to travel.

After a period of traveling and combining earlier works from Iran with newer ones, I had 2 children and spent some time in the studio, developing my still-life works. Later, I returned to exploring perspective, and in many ways, each stage naturally led to the next.

A Magician of Imagination

In Dialogue with Farhad Hasanzadeh

Interview by Dr. Neda Farnia & Dr. Johari Murray, CooterMag

Born in 1962 in Abadan, Iran, Farhad Hasanzadeh became a war migrant during the war between Iran and Iraq (Sep. 22, 1980 – Aug. 20, 1988). Since 1989, he began working with Iranian children’s and young adult magazines in Tehran as a writer and a journalist. He has been the executive editor of Research Quarterly for Children’s and Young Adult Literature for four years in Iran. He’s also one of the founder members of the Association of Writers for Children and Youth in Iran. As part of a program, he read stories for children who spend difficult days in prison and for immigrant children and children from disadvantaged areas of the capital.

So far he has published over 130 books in various genres such as short stories, novels, fables, fantasy, comedy, biographies, and rewritings for children, young adults, and also adults. He has received more than 40 national awards and is one of the best writers for children and young adults in Iran. 

Hasanzadeh has been Iran’s nominee for the Astrid Lindgren (ALMA) in 2023. He’s also twice shortlisted for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2018 and 2020. He has several books in White Raven’s Lists. Furthermore, more than 30 of his works have been translated and published in English, Swedish, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, etc. 

So let’s read this wonderful interview with Mr. Farhad Hasanzadeh.

From migration to rebirth: A story of pain and liberation

Iranian painter Saye Sohrabi rose from the heart of repression to turn her canvas into a voice for silenced women. Migration wasn’t an escape, it was a rebirth; the awakening of a woman who redefines freedom through art, transforming pain into colour and silence into strength.

Image courtesy the artist and The Prisma.

by Rola Zamzameh*, The Prisma

Saye Sohrabi, an Iranian painter and photographer and textile artist, portrays the feminine world with striking honesty and courage.

Emerging from a society where women’s voices have long been repressed, she learned to break silence with colour.

For Sohrabi, migration was not an ending but the beginning of a new journey—one that led her to rediscover freedom and identity.

In this conversation with The Prisma, she reflects on life in exile, her cultural roots, and painting as a language of resistance and rebirth.

Through her art, she builds a vivid bridge between pain and liberation, transforming personal struggle into universal expression.

Jafar Panahi’s Cinematic Rebellions

In the director’s most defiant film yet, a group of Iranians consider killing the man who tortured them in prison.

Panahi films a desert scene in It Was Just an Accident. Photo: Pelleas. Image courtesy Vulture.

by Roxana Hadadi, Vulture

The third time Iranian director Jafar Panahi was arrested, it was with his wife, his daughter, and 15 of his friends. It was March 2010, and he and Mohammad Rasoulof had been filming a movie that would examine, in Panahi’s typical social-realist style, how the recent disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the wave of protests that followed rippled through multiple generations of one family. The pair knew Iran’s conservative government, which reviews scripts and withholds permits for movies of which it doesn’t approve, would never let them make it. So they began filming at Panahi’s home in secret. They had nearly 30 percent of the movie shot when news of their project got out and his apartment was raided. “It’s not important how they found out,” Panahi tells me. “We just were not experienced enough, and we didn’t know how to hide it.”

Panahi, 65, and I are seated at the upscale restaurant Reign in Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York hotel along with theater historian and professor Sheida Dayani, who is serving as his translator during the press tour for his latest film, It Was Just an Accident, which was made in secret over 25 days on the streets of Tehran. (He’s since learned how to hide better.) He arrived in what I’ve come to think of as the Panahi uniform: darkly tinted glasses, a black polo shirt, and an army-green jacket with a whiff of cigarette smoke about him. (He goes through three packs a day.) His voice is a rich baritone, like a rumble coming from deep inside a mountain. He’s feeling a little under the weather today. In lieu of the Persian folk remedy nabat, or rock candy, he’s sipping from a mug of hot water with honey hours before It Was Just an Accident’s Toronto Film Festival premiere this past September, the sixth stop on a worldwide tour that began at Cannes in late May, where Panahi’s film took the Palme d’Or. With that award, he joined the “triple crown” club, comprising filmmakers who have won the top prize at Europe’s major film festivals, along with Venice and Berlin. (He has three predecessors: Henri-Georges Clouzot, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Robert Altman.)

The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860–1979 (New Texts Out Now)

“We discovered what we call the matrilineal network of activism, spanning from grandmothers to mothers, to daughters, and nieces...” 

Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor, The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860–1979 (Stanford University Press, 2025). Image courtesy Hamid Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor and Jadaliyya.

by Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor, Jadaliyya

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Talinn Grigor (TG): The idea for the book was conceived in May 2019 during the Second Feminist Armenian Studies workshop, which took place at UC Irvine, as we began to think about a question posed by a participant following my talk on Armenian women architects in modern Iran. She asked whether these women had “managed to move the needle” to benefit women’s causes. That sparked our initial conversation about doing research and writing a book together on the history of Iran’s Armenian women. Although Houri is the authority on Irano-Armenian women’s history, at the conference she was presenting on the revolutionary Rubina, so we both noticed that I was the only one, among fifteen speakers, who presented on Irano-Armenian women. That, along with the question posed by the audience member, was the dual spark that started the project.

Houri Berberian (HB): I had wanted to write my second book on that very topic, but several hindrances, from not being granted a visa to enter Iran to not having the network and connections to the Irano-Armenian diasporic communities, kept me from going beyond producing an article at the time. Moreover, it became very clear that this history could not be told solely by relying on textual sources. We had to rethink our time-honored methods for writing histories and mining sources.

The Foot-Licking Demons & Other Strange Things in a 1921 Illustrated Manuscript from Iran

Courtesy OC.

by Josh Jones, OC

Few modern writers so remind me of the famous Virginia Woolf quote about fiction as a “spider’s web” more than Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attaches his labyrinths is a librarian’s life; the strands that anchor his fictions are the obscure scholarly references he weaves throughout his text. Borges brings this tendency to whimsical employ in his nonfiction Book of Imaginary Beings, a heterogeneous compendium of creatures from ancient folktale, myth, and demonology around the world.

Borges himself sometimes remarks on how these ancient stories can float too far away from ratiocination. The “absurd hypotheses” regarding the mythical Greek Chimera, for example, “are proof” that the ridiculous beast “was beginning to bore people…. A vain or foolish fancy is the definition of Chimera that we now find in dictionaries.” Of  what he calls “Jewish Demons,” a category too numerous to parse, he writes, “a census of its population left the bounds of arithmetic far behind.

Simorgh in Exile:

Reimagining Iranian Diaspora in Fereshteh Molavi’s Thirty Shadow Birds

by Mahdiyeh Ezzati, World Literature Today

In Thirty Shadow Birds (2019), Fereshteh Molavi constructs a literary landscape where diasporic identity is neither fixed nor nostalgic but refracted through narrative, myth, and memory. The novel’s protagonist, Yalda—an Iranian immigrant woman residing in Canada—finds herself in an unfamiliar Montréal apartment where she must offer her story in lieu of rent. This exchange, story for shelter, forms the narrative spine of Molavi’s novel and serves as an extended metaphor for the transactional and often uneasy nature of diasporic storytelling within the context of state multiculturalism, literary markets, and cultural consumption. Through its interweaving of Persian literary motifs—particularly the myth of the Simorgh from Attar’s Conference of the Birds—and a persistent refusal to conform to Western expectations of diasporic victimhood, Thirty Shadow Birds maps out a space for diasporic re-collectivity grounded in what Yalda herself calls “woodling,” the act of weaving and doodling fragments of her life into a form of storytelling that refuses closure or commodification. This hybrid mode of narration resists neat categorizations, mirroring Yalda’s own hyphenated existence as an Iranian-Canadian woman attempting to articulate a coherent self across cultures, languages, and political histories.

Molavi opens the novel with a direct invocation of a Persian matal, a folkloric nonsense rhyme traditionally used to lull children into sleep: “I have a tale to tell, with a bird as a head, with a bird as a tail. Shall I tell it, or shall I not tell it?” While such matals are repetitive and playful in their original context, their appearance in Thirty Shadow Birds is deeply defamiliarized. In Yalda’s voice, this rhyme is not a call to sleep but a demand to be heard. Rather than amusing or pacifying, the matal opens a space where urgency replaces lullaby, where voice asserts itself against silence. Its repetition throughout the novel serves as both an invocation and a challenge, suggesting that the stakes of storytelling in exile are always entangled with the question of audience, legibility, and worth. For Yalda, the telling of the tale is never an innocent act. It is a means of survival, a performance negotiated under the shadow of expectation, and a gesture toward diasporic collectivity.

Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives, Second Edition (New Texts Out Now)

“What does contemporaneity signify for Iranian artists, and how have they drawn inspiration from contemporary life?”

Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives, Second Edition (Saqi Books, 2025). Image courtesy Hamid Keshmirshekan and Jadaliyya.

by Hamid Keshmirshekan, Jadaliyya

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Hamid Keshmirshekan (HK): Having worked for decades on the modern and contemporary art of Iran—and the wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—and its relationship to discursive movements and socio-political developments, I have come to see that Euro-American paradigms cannot be uncritically applied to the study of Iranian art as though these frameworks possess universal validity. These analyses often fail to account for the local discursive contexts of artistic production, their cultural implications, and their integration into local historical narratives. This has produced unbalanced historiographies and art-historical sources that consign non-Western art to the periphery. This book emerges from that problem and continues my broader scholarship on the “decolonization” of art history, with a particular focus on the so-called Global South and the MENA region in particular. Here, I aim to challenge the authority of a single, dominant art-historical discourse and to expose how different subjectivities are reproduced within particular narratives. My objective is to establish ways of defining art-historical and temporal perception in the context of Iran.

While I draw on certain “global” art-historical paradigms, including critical theory and methodological models, much of the book’s content is grounded in primary sources, many in Persian, as well as my own field observations and interviews with artists, curators, critics, and cultural activists. Teaching the theory and history of art of Iran and the MENA region in universities in both the United Kingdom and Iran has allowed me to test and refine these arguments in dialogue with students and colleagues across contemporary art history, theory, and Islamic art and material culture. My sustained engagement with Iran’s contemporary art scene over the past few decades has also given me access to insider perspectives, prevailing concerns within the artistic community, and the ways these are reflected in artistic strategies. Together, these experiences have shaped the critical lens through which this book examines its subject.

The first edition appeared in 2013, at a time when no comprehensive study of this scope existed, despite the rapid growth of research on modern and contemporary art of the MENA region. In many respects, it entered uncharted territory, aiming to fill a significant gap in scholarship. Since then, profound changes have occurred in both the Iranian art scene and the broader social and political context, making a second edition necessary. This edition takes stock of the major transformations of the past decade, both historically and intellectually. Twelve years on, I also used the opportunity to reflect on the book’s methodological, historical, and structural dimensions and to consider how the study of contemporary art and society might be further developed. The revisions vary across chapters: some have been substantially reworked, others updated with new material, and sections where the original content remained valid have been lightly revised. A new introduction sets out these reflections and brings the work up to date.

The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran

#RivetingReviews: Mandy Wight reviews THE NIGHTS ARE QUIET IN TEHRAN by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin

by Mandy Wight, #RivetingReviews, European Literature Network

This is the story of a young Iranian couple, Behzad and Nahid, who flee Iran after the 1979 Revolution and settle and have a family in West Germany. Their story is told in four sections – each one narrated by a different member of the family – taking place at ten yearly intervals, often coinciding with significant events in Iran, and capturing both Iranian and German society at particular moments in time. Behzad is a revolutionary, and political developments in Iran are very much at the forefront of the narrative, yet these are interwoven with the characters’ personal lives, family relationships and the experience of exile and loss of culture. 

We first meet Behzad in 1979, when the Shah has been deposed, and progressive political activists are on the streets campaigning for a fairer society. Behzad and his comrades dream that portraits of the Shah in each schoolroom will be replaced by those of Che and Castro, of Mao and Lenin. For all the heady revolutionary fervour, the allusions to street fighting and blood, Behzad at twenty-seven still lives at home, enjoying observing the womenfolk prepare stuffed vine leaves, aware his mother watches him intently as he leaves to join the protests ‘as if she’s trying to memorise my face’. He’s also aware of a young woman amongst their group with serious, clever eyes – Nahid. As the revolution progresses it’s clear that religious elements are taking control, and within a short space of time, the revolutionaries have been outdone by Ayatollah Khomeini. The Revolutionary Guard starts carrying out the torture and executions of political opponents, and Behzad and his comrades start fearing for their lives.