The works of Jarman Award–winning artist Maryam Tafakory are gripping meditations on desire, erasure, and resistance. Layering imagery from post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, archival documents, autobiographical fragments, and found sound, Tafakory excavates speculative histories of female intimacy and solidarity censored by the state and excised from official records. Her tactile assemblages—swaths of saturated color, half-hidden figures, and text—reflect on the limits of representation while unsettling the West’s reductive understandings of Iranian life and history. She presents three recent works—Daria’s Night Flowers (2025), Razeh-del (2024), and Mast-del (2023)—charged portraits of pleasure and defiance in the face of coercion and oppression, alongside a special live performance that expands on questions of omission, absence, and memory.
Followed by a conversation with Maryam Tafakory and audience Q&A. Presented with support from the Walker Art Center