Iran’s Social Revolution: The Heartbeat Continues

Michael M. J. Fischer at Public Books:

In 1978, the painter Nicky Nodjoumi returned to Tehran from New York just in time for the women’s mass marches against the shah. While there, Nodjoumi joined 30 students and professors in the production of posters at Tehran University’s Faculty of Fine Arts. The group held an exhibition to which some 5,000 people a day came, and a space for people to make their own posters. This particular effort of nonsectarian democracy in action—working with but keeping independent of all parties and factions—was short-lived. The art spaces were burned down by a hardline Muslim organization in 1979.

Between 2005 and 2008 Taraneh Hemami—an artist living in the San Francisco, California, area—created an installation of leftist documents that had been buried in northern Iran, retrieved, and brought to America. The installation was to allow her generation, and younger generations, to engage with otherwise largely lost ephemera (pamphlets, newspaper articles, letters) of their parent’s generations before and during the 1979 revolution.

More here.