In Brief
Iranian Artist Gets 12 Years in Prison for Political Cartoon
Atena Farghadani, a 28-year-old artist on trial in Iran over a cartoon that depicts members of parliament as animals, has been sentenced to 12 years and 9 months in prison.
Iran
Art
An Artist's Take on Iranian Identity, Detailed and Filled with Drugs
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — “I’d be OK with someone rolling up my work and smoking it,” laughs artist Taravat Talepasand on the eve of her opening at Beta Pictoris Gallery in Birmingham, Alabama.
Art
Rorschach Inkblots Conjure Up Themes of Loss in Iran
It’s not so easy for Iranian-American artists to portray their hyphenated identities.
Art
A New Media Artist Looks to Iranian Spam
Completed in June, "Like Pearls" in as an animated and interactive web-based collage inspired by Farsi spam from Morehshin Allahyari’s inbox.
In Brief
Artists's Work Caught in Canadian Customs Quagmire
Canadian Border Services have barred Iranian-born filmmaker Sadaf Foroughi from bringing an artwork into Canada because of the country's sanctions against Iran, the Globe and Mail reported.
Film
A Secret Film Smuggled Out into the World
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi continues to make movies. Caged in his perverse, Kafkaesque "larger prison," Panahi faces a 20-year ban by the Iranian government on filmmaking, international travel, and interviews.
Art
Meditations in Longing
LOS ANGELES — The writer Rebecca Solnit once wrote, “Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t exist.” For artists Golnar Adili and Samira Yamin, the process of remembering is
News
Legendary Iranian Diva Challenges Taboos with Lesbian Couple
The name Googoosh is pop cultural catnip to people across Western and Central Asia, and her latest video "بهشت" (Behesht or Heaven), which was released on Valentine's Day, may be the first explicit reference to lesbianism in mainstream Iranian pop culture.
Art
Iran's Reinvention Through Modern Art
Asia Society's Iran Modern is a must-see exploration of a period little known in the West but infinitely interesting for its non-Western responses to modernity, its embrace of the developing world, the prevalence of prominent female artists at a time when the same wasn't true most elsewhere, and its
Art
Remembering Iran's Fight for Democracy in Brooklyn
There was a time, some four years ago, when Iran held the world's attention. Protests began there in June 2009, after the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in what many claimed was a rigged vote. A graphic video of the death of a young woman named Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot by a member
News
Censored Iranian Filmmaker Shoots Film Entirely on iPhones
LOS ANGELES — Last year, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison for "propaganda against the state." In addition to the prison sentence, he was banned from making films for twenty years. But his latest film is shot entirely on iPhones.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, how a Caravaggio becomes "discovered" and evaluated, Christo gets the green light for Colorado, artists who seek out their harshest critics, Terence Conran, erasing a Chris Martin, escaping the digital world, Occupy Miami art schools, street art in Iran and is politics performance art?