Who is azadeh moaveni

The empress was an easy target, although not the best one. She recovered quickly, noting that her freedom to give such a speech was a sign of progress. Everyone clapped. How could they not? But the incident led to awkwardness among her artist friends, who began to wonder how closely they wanted to be associated with the regime. Warhol was more dispassionate, ignoring petitions by Kate Millett and Allen Ginsberg urging him to abandon his commissions from Tehran.

When the royal couple fled Tehran in January , they left the crown jewels behind. But other accounts dispute this. During the Iran-Iraq War, the museum closed and pre-revolutionary artists went underground. The authorities demanded art that served the revolution and which existed where the people could see it, primarily on the sides of buildings.

They produced war cinema that no one watched, films that state television was obliged to broadcast at 3 a. It was sold to the American billionaire David Geffen, and the proceeds were used to buy pages of the Houghton Shahnameh , a particularly magnificent edition of the Persian Book of Kings, that had been taken apart and sold as single leaves by a collector in the s.

The purchase satisfied nobody. No one spoke of selling from the collection again. In , I visited the artist Khosrow Hassanzadeh at his basement studio in Tehran. I was interested in his tall silhouette paintings of chador-clad women, their forms suggestive of coffins, and his silkscreens depicting the victims of a serial killer who had targeted prostitutes in the shrine city of Mashad.

The silkscreens were inspired by Warhol and the bold colours seemed to distinguish the women from their mugshots the only images he had to work with. Hassanzadeh had studied in the private underground art school that one of the curators of the museum when the shah fell, Aydin Aghdashloo, started after the revolution, and went on to produce a series called Warhol Saved Me.

While taking care not to offend too many clerics, he put on ambitious shows, such as the British sculpture retrospective in , building links with other institutions. He even dared to display the Bacon triptych, although minutes before the opening the police arrived and removed the central panel. There was a wave of enthusiasm for visual art, which like cinema and theatre, carried on a conversation that might have been conducted by political parties or human rights organisations, had they been permitted.

The harrowing paintings of Delara Darabi, for instance, who was sentenced to death in for a crime committed by her boyfriend, were shown at a prominent Tehran gallery as part of an unsuccessful international campaign to secure her release. In , Iranians angry at his re-election revolted. Their protests grew into the largest mobilisation since the revolution, which was put down with great ferocity by the security forces.

The Iran-Iraq War and the flashpoints of violence that followed pushed many towards film and photography, in an attempt to challenge the state narrative of the recent past. The artist Shirin Neshat has said that her discovery of an irreversibly altered country on her return to Iran in transformed her life and work. All About Georgia McKay. Press play to watch video. Previous Close Next. You may also like Cheat Sheet: Lindy West. So why no celebrations?

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