Maryam Tafakory works with film and performance. She was the 2024 winner of the Film London Jarman Award.
Her film, Mast-del, premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and was among Film Comment’s Best Short Films of 2023 and Sight&Sound’s Best Video Essays of 2023. Her first UK solo exhibition, I Want To Tell You What I Can’t, was one of Artforum’s Critics’ Picks of 2023.
LUX London distributes her work.
Born and raised in Iran, Tafakory is a visual artist who makes textual and filmic collages that bring together poetry, speculative nonfiction, and archival material.
Exploring the different registers through which images speak or refuse to speak, her work attempts to dissect veiled acts of erasure – of bodies, intimacies, and histories. Her research-based projects consider what is often neglected and discarded as trivial or excessive, looking at historical gaps, unspoken rules, and concealed queer stories. She has an ongoing body of films, performances, and video essays in dialogue with post-revolution Iranian cinema.
Selected solo screenings/exhibitions include: MoMA, New York; BOZAR, Brussels; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Academy Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; BEURSSCHOUWBURG, Brussels; e-flux, New York; Filmoteca de Catalunya, Barcelona; LUX, London; among others.
Selected group events include: Tate Modern, London; Cannes’ Directors Fortnight; New York Film Festival; Locarno Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; Villa Medici, Rome; HKW Berlin; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; and Anthology Film Archives, New York, among others.
She was awarded the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival; the Tiger Short Award at the 51st Rotterdam IFF; the Cinema & Gioventù Best International Short Film award at the 77th Locarno Film Festival, the Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival; and the Best Experimental Film Award at the 70th and 71st Melbourne International Film Festival, among others.
Her recent video essay, received the most nominations in Sight&Sound’s Best Video Essays of 2023, and appeared on Hyperallergic.
She was the 2019 Flaherty/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence, a MacDowell Fellow in 2023.
pronouns [she/they/او]
