State of Concept is proud to announce the opening of the solo exhibition of Iranian artist Maryam Tafakory, presenting three films, part of our exhibition chapter State Affairs, on Friday the 31st of May at 18:30.
Maryam Tafakory works with film and performance, creating textual and filmic collages that stitch together poetry, documentary, and archival material. Tafakory’s work is situated among multiple overlapping formal lineages: the essay film and cinephile documentary. Exploring the different registers through which images speak or refuse to speak to us, her films attempt to dissect veiled acts of erasure – of bodies, intimacies, and histories. Her research-based projects consider what is often neglected and discarded as trivial and excessive. She has an ongoing body of video essays in dialogue with post-revolution Iranian cinema.
Her most recent film, Mast-del (2023), premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and was among Film Comment’s Best Short Films of 2023 and Sight & Sound’s Best Films of 2023. Her first UK solo exhibition was one of Artforum’s Critics’ Picks of 2023. A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires, both inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema. It is presented here together with two previous films, Irani Bag (2020) and Nazarbazi (2022), in which again Tafakory uses excerpts of films produced in the period of post-revolution Iranian cinema in the 90s, creating video essays questioning the censorship of women’s bodies that have been erased and victimised as well the prohibited love and desire between men and women.
State Affairs, since 2017 is an exhibition chapter dedicated to artists that work with video and the moving image. It presents artistic practices that focus on thematics unfolding and narrated gradually through several artworks, practices distinguished for their interest in shedding light on historical conditions and how they affect contemporaneity. The practices selected for this exhibition chapter are characterized by an essayistic approach to issues that involve, racism, religion, futurism, post-colonial discourse, nationalism etc., at times blending, documentary, performance and the moving image. The programme aims to directly address current affairs, predicaments, problematics and cul-de-sacs of contemporary living, by at times, summoning the past.
Press release from State of Concept Athens
Image: Maryam Tafakory. Still Image, Nazarbazi. 2022. Digital coloured film, 19 min. Image courtesy of the artist
