‘Meet the Artist: Maryam Tafakory’

In collaboration with feminist film journal Another Gaze, Bozar presents a recurring program around Iranian cinema made from 1979 to the present day by women and non-binary filmmakers.  

For this third instalment we’ve invited Maryam Tafakory, an artist versed in a wide variety of art forms. With her filmic collages she puts archival footage, poetry, performance, and cinema in dialogue with each other to create poignant reflections on post-revolution Iran and its social constructs and taboos. Tafakory will present three of her most recent films, together with a lecture/performance.  

Performance (IRN, 2021-ongoing, Digital projection and live performance, 21') 

​​​​​​​Irani Bag (IRN, 2021, DCP, 8’, Farsi with English subtitles) 
This split-screen video essay deconstructs 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, using excerpts of films produced between 1990 and 2018. 

Nazarbazi (IRN, 2022, DCP, 19’, Farsi with 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. It 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. 

Mast-del (IRN, 2023, DCP, 17’, Farsi with English subtitles)  
Two women lie together in bed. As the wind bashes against the window, one recalls a past date with a man in Tehran. The narrated scene cannot be conveyed through images. Layers of found and original footage are superimposed to fill in some of the cracks, the deletions, the limits of representation. A love song that would never pass through the censors.