Iranian Artists, from London to Toronto

In the week just past, Iranian artists kept widening the territory of cultural Iran. Let us look at the broad presence of artists who, despite all the limits and pressures that shadow life and cultural work in Iran, continue to create and to carry a part of their society's experience to the world. It is a pity that no listening ear is to be found among the world's politicians, and let that pass, for the subject here is art, and a land whose cultural borders reach far beyond its geographic ones.

Cultural Iran is a body of different voices, in Persian, Turkish, Kurdish and other languages, in cinema, painting, music and literature, from those who have stayed in Iran to those who have emigrated. The geographic border has now given way to the experience, language and memory of this society and to their expression in culture and art.

Let us begin in London. The exhibition A Present Tense has gathered nearly two hundred works by about one hundred Iranian artists at Ab-Anbar Gallery. About twenty galleries and art spaces in Iran took part in shaping it, and most of the artists shown still live and work in Iran. What hangs on the walls in London has come out of Iran as it is today, from studios whose artists contend with economic hardship, restrictions on transporting artworks and barriers to reaching the international art market. The organisers have also stressed artistic independence and opposition to censorship.

The name A Present Tense takes on another meaning from here. A work of art, even when it holds no direct sign of politics or protest, carries the time and place of its making. What is seen in London is a part of the lived experience of Iran today.

In Toronto, the same present tense has taken another shape on the cinema screen. In Rehearsals for a Revolution, Pegah Ahangarani rebuilds more than four decades of history out of family pictures, home movies, street protests, recorded voices and the memories of those close to her. In her film, history passes through the home and the family, and the public event returns to personal experience. The film had earlier won the L'Oeil d'or for best documentary at Cannes.

In Tehran, Under the Skin, Afsaneh Salari looks at Tehran by another route. Her camera enters cosmetic surgery clinics and, through bodies that want to change, arrives at social pressure, self-image and the wish for control over the body. At the same festival, Maryam Tafakory returns with Ghazal-e Sorkh to the memory of the Shiraz Arts Festival, and in Peacocks Come with the Clouds, Parastoo Anoushahpour searches for another Iran among villages, objects and memories.

Among these images, the short film A Sweet Day by Omid Abdollahi has a seemingly simple setting. After a long time, a woman gets the chance of a private visit with her imprisoned husband and tries, in the cold surroundings of the prison, to bring something of their past love back to life.

It seems that the line between "Iranian art at a world festival" and life inside Iran grows thinner and thinner, when a prison becomes a place for rediscovering one another, dialogue and mutual understanding between a wife and a husband. A distinctive expression that calls for a particular way of seeing. And this in an age when, as we all know, in many parts of the world, our Iran among them, the shadow of prison and repression has gone beyond prison walls and weighs on the life of a large part of society.

When distance and distrust find their way into the closest human bonds, rediscovering the other and opening a dialogue are the path to repair. The prison in Abdollahi's film is perhaps a compressed condition that makes people see one another again.

A few days earlier, at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, Laleh Marzban received the Orizzonti award for best actress for her role in Moragheb, internationally titled Falling House, directed by Mohsen Gharaei. This film's story also turns around a home. It follows a family on the outskirts of Tehran whose home is threatened with demolition, while the rift between generations, fear, control and the wish to leave gradually erode the family's bonds.

Marzban dedicated her award to the women of her country who, in her words, have paid the highest price for the smallest freedoms. A few days later, The Guardian reported, there were calls on Iranian state television for her to be barred from working, and a news agency urged the culture ministry to bar her return to Iran. Within one week, the same actress was applauded in Venice and threatened in her own country.

Marzban's story is one example. Beyond all the applause, another story, painful and real, is unfolding.

Outside Iran, people applaud the Iranian artist, see the work, screen the film and write about it. Inside, reports by independent organisations still tell of restrictions on freedom of expression and the imprisonment of writers and thinkers. In its Freedom to Write Index for 2025, PEN America recorded 53 jailed writers in Iran, ten more than the year before, and attributed the rise to the crackdown that followed the June 2025 war. In this assessment Iran stands second after China.

The death penalty is part of the same reality. In a report dated May 21, 2026, Amnesty International said that at least 78 protesters, dissidents and people with real or perceived links to opposition groups were then under sentence of death, and it described the trials in these cases as grossly unfair.

These artists, each in a language and with a gaze of their own, portray their time and the tangible social and political realities of the present. Part of this art's strength comes from facing hard experiences, from separation, migration, prison, war, pressure, family and memory. What becomes an artistic experience for an audience in a cinema or a gallery may still be part of daily life for someone else.

This week the title A Present Tense reaches beyond the walls of Ab-Anbar Gallery. Iran's present tense can be seen in the works of a hundred artists in London, on the screens of Toronto, in the Venice award and in the names that appear in reports on imprisonment and death sentences. Together they are one picture, full of contradictions, yet alive.

Cultural Iran goes on creating and the world goes on applauding. Many Iranians take pride in these achievements on the world stage. The hope is that those around the world who see, from beyond the border walls, this people's power to grow and flourish, and who applaud it, will call on their governments to hear the voice of the imprisoned people of Iran.