Her response to the horrors of our times gives her work purpose and energy. . . . In her depiction of everyday mental and physical brutality, she creates images of aesthetic appeal but disturbing ambiguity.--Lutz Becker

The Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar expresses her reaction to the perplexing situations in her homeland through a wide variety of techniques, from photography to digital drawings and multi-media installations.

This publication presents a selection of her most startling work so far, created in response to the dramatic social and political upheaval that she experienced after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the murder of her parents in Tehran.

Though the inspiration behind Forouhar's subject matter may be tragic, her work has a great emotional range: the results are sometimes macabre, occasionally darkly humorous, and often purely joyful.

Parastou Forouhar was born in 1962 in Tehran, and since 1991 has lived and worked in Germany. She received her BA in art from the University of Tehran (1990) and her MA from the Hochschule fur Gestaltung Offenbach am Main, Germany (1994).

Rose Issa is a curator and writer who has championed visual art and film from the Arab world and Iran for nearly thirty years. Her gallery Rose Issa Projects showcases the best in upcoming and established artists from the Arab world and Iran.

Malileh Afnan's work appears 'as a relic of an older civilization or an archaeological excavation into the collective psyche. The delicacy of Persian miniatures and manuscripts, which she remembers from childhood, is mirrored in her love for intimate scale and the refined beauty of muted colour'. Calligraphy plays an important role: images appear that suggest the written word. Works on paper and tablets of painted plaster are reminiscent of ancient, almost obliterated texts, and like palimpsests, retain only some vestige of literal meaning and an impression of human contact. Afnan has absorbed both Middle Eastern and Western influences. She has looked towards such artists as Pollock, Rothko, Dubuffet and Klee, and shares an affinity with the American artist Mark Tobey, who helped arrange the first European exhibition of her work in 1971.

Arabicity reflects on four decades of the aesthetic, conceptual, and socio-political concerns of contemporary Arab artists. Beautifully produced, it features over 200 artworks by more than 35 Arab artists including Bahia Shehab, Ayman Baalbaki, Hassan Hajjaj, and Raeda Saadeh, who explore their cultural heritage, and themes such as memory, destruction, and conflict, with great warmth, humour and visual poetry. Whether through video art, painting, photography or installation, these artists challenge the confines of their identity, resist stereotyping, and reshape the parameters of their cultural traditions. In their diverse media and subject matter, their works reflect the pulse of the region. In chaos they discover what endures.

'Being a woman in Iran is hard, and working as a woman photographer is even harder' - Shadi Ghadirian. Shadi Ghadirian is one of Iran's leading contemporary photographers. Born in Tehran in 1974, she has exhibited widely in Europe and the US, and her work has been collected by museums worldwide. She came to the limelight in the late 90s with her Qajar series, in which she examines the paradoxical position of women in Iran. Women in traditional clothing pose with items such as a mountain bike - permitted a hundred years ago, and now forbidden to women. Ghadirian's oeuvre is a spirited wink at authority. With witty parodies of domesticity, she neatly sidesteps both restrictions and expectations.