{"id":10292,"date":"2026-05-07T16:06:36","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T22:06:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/?p=10292"},"modified":"2026-05-07T16:07:53","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T22:07:53","slug":"an-evening-with-maryam-tafakory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/2026\/05\/07\/an-evening-with-maryam-tafakory\/","title":{"rendered":"An Evening with Maryam Tafakory"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Razeh-del,
Razeh-del, Maryam Tafakory, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and LUX.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The works of Jarman Award\u2013winning artist Maryam Tafakory are gripping meditations on resistance, erasure, and desire. Layering imagery from post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, archival documents, autobiographical fragments, and found sound, Tafakory excavates speculative histories of female intimacy and activism censored from official records. Her tactile assemblages\u2014swaths of saturated color, half-hidden figures, and text\u2014reflect on the limits of representation while unsettling the West\u2019s reductive understandings of Iranian life and history. She presents a live film performance of a new work, Gol[e] Sorkh <\/em>(2026), which explores the roles women played in leftist movements in the years leading up to the Islamic Revolution. The program also includes two recent films\u2014Daria\u2019s Night Flowers <\/em>(2025) and Razeh-del <\/em>(2024)\u2014charged portraits of pleasure and defiance in the face of coercion and oppression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Followed by a conversation with Maryam Tafakory and audience Q&A. Presented with support from the Walker Art Center. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2023\u20132026, Iran\/United Kingdom\/France\/Italy
In Farsi with English subtitles.
Format: DCP and live performance
ca 75 mins<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ABOUT THE ARTIST<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maryam Tafakory (born and raised in Iran) works with film and performance, bringing together poetry, speculative nonfiction, and archival material to examine veiled acts of erasure\u2014of bodies, intimacies, and histories. She is the 2024 recipient of the Film London Jarman Award. Her work has been presented in solo screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Barbican Centre (London), BOZAR (Brussels), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (Los Angeles) and has screened at major international festivals including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, and Cannes Directors\u2019 Fortnight. Tafakory\u2019s films have received numerous awards (several Oscar-qualifying) including the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival, Best Documentary Short at the 72nd Melbourne International Film Festival, the Tiger Short Award at the 51st International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Cinema & Giovent\u00f9 Award at the 77th Locarno Film Festival. She was the 2019 Flaherty\/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence, a MacDowell Fellow in 2023, and an Institute for Ideas and Imagination Fellow in 2025. She teaches in the Master of  Fine Art program at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and holds a PhD from Kingston University, London. She is currently developing her debut feature film, Hospital of Irremediable Desires, drawing on ongoing research into illicit desires, queer disappearances, and women\u2019s involvement in Iran\u2019s clandestine revolutionary movements of the 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PROGRAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Razeh-del<\/strong>
2024, 28 mins
The dense layerings of inky newsprint and appropriated footage in Maryam Tafakory\u2019s Razeh-del<\/em> tell the history of Zan<\/em>, Iran\u2019s first women\u2019s newspaper, whose brief run in the late 1990s inspires two schoolgirls. Amid intensely saturated fields of amethyst, crimson, and amber, images of women emerge and dissolve, smothered in inscriptions quoting angry responses from male readers and words of support from women who dream of an impossible cinema.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daria\u2019s Night Flowers<\/strong><\/em>
2025, 16 mins
Daria has written her first manuscript about falling in love with a mysterious girl called \u2018abi\u2019 [blue]. The night flowers in her garden hide the secrets of a country that has turned love stories into routine crime scenes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gol[e] Sorkh<\/strong><\/em>
2026, ca 30 mins
Gol[e] Sorkh<\/em> traces the censorship of the word gol, or \u201cflower,\u201d in the final tumultuous years of imperial Iran, just before the 1979 Revolution. Tafakory draws on this history of censorship to examine the role of women in the era\u2019s leftist movements and their ultimate suppression by Iran’s pre- and post-revolutionary governments, as well as the CIA and MI6.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ACCESSIBILITY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conversations at the Edge events have live captions (CART). The Gene Siskel Film Center is fully ADA accessible and its theaters are equipped with hearing loops. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu\/access or write cate@saic.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The works of Jarman Award\u2013winning artist Maryam Tafakory are gripping meditations on resistance, erasure, and desire. Layering imagery from post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, archival documents, autobiographical fragments, and found sound, Tafakory excavates speculative histories of female intimacy and activism censored from official records. Her tactile assemblages\u2014swaths of saturated color, half-hidden figures, and text\u2014reflect on the limits […]<\/p>\n

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