February 2017. Display at the Tate Modern, London (UK): Iranian Photobooks: from Revolution to War. I was honoured to present these “photobooks” published in Iran between 1979 and today, in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern. The display includes both leading independent photographers (e.g., Kaveh Golestan, Bahman Jalali, and Alfred Yaghoubzadeh) as well as state publications that use photos by the same photographers, but packaged differently to reflect political and national concerns. We find ourselves immersed in conflicting accounts of the 1979 Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, with this display offering a way to interpret them. In collaboration with my fellow curator Sarah Allen whose perspicacity I salute.

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December 2016. Exhibition Au-delà de la forme (‘Beyond Form’), Richard Serra and Mehdi Moutashar, Palais du Tau, Reims (France). A meeting of two outstanding artists in an unexpected context, on the initiative of the collector Didier Moiselet who, to his credit, crossed the line between conceptual minimalism and metaphysical geometry, between abstraction and hypervision, between letters and hieroglyphs – somewhere between Baghdad and New York. Huge respect from Zamân Books (an interview with Didier Moiseletto will appear in Zamân n°8).

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October 2016. A retrospective exhibition of works by Faouzi Laatiris, Catalogue déraisonné, Mohamed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rabat, Morocco. In the process of hanging the poster of the exhibition on the façade of the museum which, for Faouzi and me, has become our ship. Immense pride to be curator for this out of the ordinary, iconoclastic emancipated artist, spiritual son of Marcel Duchamp and Mahmoud Darwish. The exhibition is a follow-up to the first part, Volumes Fugitifs, in which Faouzi was in the company of the most outstanding of his former students from the Institut National des Beaux-Arts in Tétouan. Catalogue published by Kulte Editions and Yasmina Naji, in collaboration with Maud Houssais. Presses du Réel, 2016.

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December 2016. Galerie Atelier 21, Casablanca, Morocco. In the company of artist painter Mohammed Abouelouakar who only exhibits once every 3 or 4 years, a real hermit whose paintings (here “playing cards”) revive old Sufi tales and other pagan or ecumenical, Arab, Russian or Byzantine inspired mythologies, now very largely eliminated from Moroccan culture. He is undoubtedly one of the most underrated artists in his own country, although he has the stature of the greatest – uncompromisingly impervious to fashion, totally focused on his vocation as a nomadic storyteller. God will recognize his own.

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December 2016. Collections of classical art from the São Paulo Museum of Art, Brazil. A very dear art historian colleague who is staying in Brazil sent me this photo via WhatsApp. The paintings seem to be floating, released at last from the weight of the walls and architecture, in this museum built in 1968 (year of revolution) by Lina Bo Bardi. The scenography leaves many a museum trailing behind, to put it mildly.

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October 2016. Café Naderi, Tehran, Iran. I have come on a pilgrimage to hang out in the Lalezar district, the mecca of the Tehran artistic bohemian set. This was the café of choice for several generations of writers and painters, such as Sadegh Hedayat in the 1920s or Bahman Mohassess in the 1960s, where they smoked and talked (their photos are up on the wall behind me). No difficulty believing I’m here, even though tea has taken the place of whisky. I don’t want to wake up.

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<font style="line-height:24px"September 2016. The exhibition Traité de Paix, San Telmo Museum, San Sebastian, in the Spanish Basque Country. A palpable hit, this multi-faceted exhibition curated by Pedro Romero, in which Velázquez and Marcel Broodthaers rub shoulders, and 17th century maps are hung alongside documentary photographs, and “imaginary” collections square up to national collections. Spellbinding. An unforgettable model. The catalogue in four languages (French, Spanish, Basque and English) is heroic. There is a reconstruction of the surrealist exhibition La Vérité sur les colonies in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, Paris, 1931. The anti-colonialist mise en abyme continues into the street: as you leave the exhibition, there are banners saying “France and Spain go home”. This is the Basque Country in 2016.

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September 2016. Tehran Bazaar, Iran. A dear friend sent me this photo via WhatsApp. A shower of fluorescent colours on an underwear boutique which, from a distance, could be mistaken for a fairground sideshow. Anyway, fans of “Special Envoy” and other reports from the “Land of the Mullahs ” or “Iran, land of paradox”, really get value for money.

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June 2016. The Cinema Ritrovato Film Festival, Bologna, Italy. A rare retrospective of films directed by famous Iranian filmmaker and writer Ebrahim Golestan (here being interviewed by Ehsan Khoshbakht). It is as if all the Iranians in Italy came to try to unravel the mystery of this mythical director, who launched the Iranian “New Wave” before taking off, with all his secrets, for his final exile in London, a few years before the 1979 revolution. We would love to publish something at Zamân Books on the history of his films. We won’t take the risk of unraveling the mystery. We’ll make it even bigger.

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June 2016. Tate Modern, London, UK. The new display of the modern collections includes more and more “Middle East/North Africa” works; they demonstrate the tensions between figurative and abstract art in the context of the Cold War. On these walls Hamed Abdalla (Egypt), Farid Belkahia (Morocco) as well as Bahman Mohassess (Iran) hang alongside Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet and Wifredo Lam. This photo shows Hamed Abdalla’s son and grandsons as a family, armed with a video camera, come to immortalize their grandfather’s admission to the Tate. None of the 5 million visitors a year will see the work the way they see it, but by the same token, they will never see it the same way those 5 million see it. The exhibition Hamed Abdalla: ARABECEDAIRE is currently at The Mosaic Rooms, London.

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