Meet the Artist: From Iran | A Visual Testimony
Date and Time
Location
Special Virtual Event
Speaker: Azadeh Akhlaghi, Visual Artist and Photographer
In conversation with Ilisa Barbash, Curator of Visual Anthropology, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University
From Iran: A Visual Testimony is a photography exhibition featuring Azadeh Akhlaghi’s staged recreations of pivotal events in twentieth-century Iranian history. These richly detailed tableaux span the years from 1908, when the Shah dissolved Iran’s first National Assembly, to 1979, when the monarchy was overthrown and the Islamic Republic was established. In this conversation, Akhlaghi will discuss how she selected, reimagined, and staged eleven incidents from Iran’s tumultuous history, drawing on archival research, interviews, and her background in cinema. She will also explore why these events marked turning points in Iranian history and how they continue to shape the country today.
Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.
Learn more about the exhibition and the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at the Peabody Museum.
About the Speakers
Azadeh Akhlaghi (b. 1978, Shiraz) grew up in Mashhad, Iran, and studied computer science at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. She later returned to Iran, worked as assistant director to filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (2005–2008), and made short films before turning to staged photography in 2009. She won the 2009 UN-Habitat Youth Photography Competition and was a finalist for the 2016 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Her work By an Eyewitness has been exhibited internationally, including in the United States, London, Paris, Shanghai, Seoul, and Tehran. Akhlaghi was the 2019 recipient of the Peabody Museum’s Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, which supports an established photographic practitioner producing a major project “on the human condition anywhere in the world.”
Ilisa Barbash is curator of visual anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. Her book, Where the Roads All End: Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari (Peabody Museum Press, 2015), received the John Collier, Jr. Award from the Society for Visual Anthropology. Her coedited volume, To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes (Aperture/Peabody Museum Press, 2020) won the 2021 Rencontres d’Arles Best Historical Photographic Book Award.
Photo by Niles Singer, Harvard Staff Photographer