Born in Shiraz, Sokhanvari fled Iran as a child a year before the Revolution and has devoted her artistic practice to the country she left behind.
Barbican Centre
Searching for Healing in Postwar Art
An exhibition at the Barbican in London asks: How do you make sense of war’s senseless destruction and loss of human life?
Jean Dubuffet’s Highs and (Controversial) Lows
Curiously, Dubuffet’s anti-hierarchical approach to art did not translate to similar views on society.
Michael Clark: Choreographer, Club Kid, and Collaborator Extraordinaire
Cosmic Dancer casts Clark as an artist who refuses to be pinned down by a single discipline or style, though its kaleidoscopic approach occasionally loses sight of Clark himself.
Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Skillfully Flips the Script of Art History
In A Countervailing Theory, her current exhibition at the Barbican Centre, Ojih Odutola’s alternative histories take on a more epic, mythic scale.
The First Black Woman to Direct a Major Hollywood Film Is Finally Getting Her Due
Thirty years after the release of A Dry White Season, Euzhan Palcy is on a roll with a Barbican retrospective and a slew of recent screenings. Here’s a look back at some of her major works.
Anime’s Hostile Visions of the Future
Anime’s Human Machines at the Barbican Centre offers a variety of perspectives on humanity, technology, and whether the soul can exist between machines and humans.
Lee Krasner’s Second Act
Though Krasner often invited art historians to interpret her work biographically, she was too resourceful an artist for those reductive readings to overshadow her art’s complexity.
Lee Krasner’s Early Prophecies
Krasner’s teacher, Hans Hofmann, told her that her work was so good, you would have never known it was done by a woman.
The Passion and Inspiration of Creative Couples
Modern Couples explores how creative couples reshaped modern art and redefined ideas of gender and love in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
New Banksy Murals Pay Homage to Basquiat
The two murals in central London appeared just before the opening of a major Basquiat exhibition at the Barbican Centre.
A History of Science Fiction’s Future Visions
The Barbican Centre’s Into the Unknown explores science fiction as a cultural force, and how it channels our most optimistic and dystopian projections about the future.