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# National Museum of Asian Art Hosts the First US Museum Retrospective on Bahman Jalali and Rana Javadi
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/smithsonian-national-museum-of-asian-art-hosts-first-us-museum-retrospective-bahman-jalali-rana-javadi/
- Published: 2022-08-01T18:02:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T15:10:22.000Z
- Description: Opening in Washington, DC, on August 6, Living in Two Times features works by two of the most influential figures in the development of late 20th-century photography in Iran.
- Author: National Museum of Asian Art
- Tags: Announcement, Exhibition Announcement, New York, Sponsored, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-large, #Import 2025-11-24 09:22 (2021, 2022, part 2)

Bahman Jalali and his wife and closest collaborator, Rana Javadi, are noted for their sharp documentary images and haunting photomontage works. Driven by the medium’s powerful — and fragile — relationship to memory, they created an unparalleled visual record of a tumultuous period in their homeland.

[*Living in Two Times: Photography by Bahman Jalali and Rana Javadi*](https://s.si.edu/3nDrn4b?ref=hyperallergic.com) runs from August 6, 2022 through January 8, 2023 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. The exhibition features images by both photographers from the iconic series *Days of Blood, Days of Fire*, capturing events in Tehran during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, as well as pictures from Jalali’s *Khorramshahr: A City Destroyed* and *Abadan Fights On*, drawn from his years spent on the Iran-Iraq warfront.

Throughout his career, Jalali returned to his project of observing Iran’s changing lives and landscapes. A third section of the exhibition presents a selection of his images of fishing communities along the northern Persian Gulf. In addition to their documentary projects, Jalali and Javadi preserved early 20th-century archives, which they used as a basis for creating vivid photomontages that explore the role of the medium in documenting history.

This will be the first museum retrospective in the United States that offers a glimpse of Jalali’s extensive practice and the first to be presented together with a selection of Javadi’s evocative work from the late 1970s to the present.

For more information, visit [asia.si.edu](https://s.si.edu/3nDrn4b?ref=hyperallergic.com).