Maryam Tafakory’s work radically recontextualizes film, poetry, and archival sound and image in order to create a vital dialogue with post-revolution Iranian cinema. Her video essays and live performances utilize digital collage to both create and illuminate existing layers of meaning. Tafakory’s work provides a prismatic lens onto Iranian cinema and storytelling without centering the Western gaze, accessible to those who might not be familiar with the cultural artifacts she uses, even as the films are created for those who are. This program features two of Tafakory’s resonant short films, as well as a rarely performed live piece for which there can be no recording or other form of documentation. The ephemeral quality of this work makes it the most poignant expression of Tafakory’s engagement with the seen and unseen, the taboo, the abstracted, and the veiled. The program concludes with a screening of The House Is Black, the only film made by Forugh Farrokhzad, whose writings and poetry have deeply touched and influenced Maryam Tafakory from an early age.
Followed by a conversation between Maryam Tafakory and Mahdieh Fahimi
Revisiting films made in Iran after 1979, Code Names (2022-ongoing) is an archival search for the unspoken that is speaking – a search for forgotten names, for forbidden bodies, for women’s disappearances both on and off the screen. Tafakory will be narrating live; no two performances of this work are the same, and as recording is not permitted, this piece can only be experienced this once, in person.
digital projection / performance / live reading
Using excerpts of films produced between 1990 and 2018, Irani Bag is a split-screen video essay deconstructing the depiction of a seemingly innocent object – the handbag – in order to propose a textual and political analysis of censorship and intimacy in post-revolution Iran. Irani Bag invites the spectator to reconsider the relationship between sight and touch.
Farsi spoken, English subtitles
Nazarbazi (the play of glances) is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema, where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited. The film focuses primarily on images of women whose bodies have been erased and victimised in post-revolution cinema, and alludes to discrete forms of communication that operate within, yet also circumnavigate the censors. It attempts to touch the spaces we cannot touch; inner feelings/sensations – but also untouchability beyond physical contact: unspoken prohibitions/regulators that may only unveil as embodied experiences. The film uses poetry and silence as the only language/s with which we can attempt to touch these spaces of socio-political ambiguities.
Farsi spoken, English subtitles
