Toward a Persian Modernism
In the 1960s, a group of Iranian artists turned the folk objects of street shrines and talismans into modern art. Their question is still ours: how does a tradition become contemporary without becoming a costume?
The Journalدفتر
Essays, discourse, dispatches and glossaries on Persian and Iranian culture, organised in issues. Issue 01 asks what a homeland looks like when you carry it in forms rather than in nostalgia.
Also in the Journal
The Longest Night, Kept Awake
On Yalda, Iranians everywhere stay up through the darkest night of the year with pomegranates, watermelon and a book of Hafez. A dispatch on what ritual becomes when it travels.
The Garden Is an Argument
The fourfold Persian garden gave the world its word for paradise. It also gave it a theory of order, built from walls, water and shade.
Hearken to the Reed
Rumi opens his great poem with a flute cut from its reed bed. For anyone who has left a homeland, it reads less like mysticism than like a description of daily life.
Persepolis and the Bauhaus
An ancient ceremonial city and a twentieth-century German art school have nothing in common but everything that matters: the grid, the column, the workshop and the dream of a total work.