30 Years is a limited-edition artist book consisting of ten prints by the husband-and-wife team Tarlan Rafiee and Yashar Samimi Mofakham. It includes illustrations of consumer items and pop culture icons from Iran and the greater Middle East layered with imagery related to warfare (e.g., a missile) or industry (e.g., an oil rig), mosaic designs and calligraphy associated with classical Islamic art, and iconography from European art history. For example, Rafiee’s hand-coloured giclée prints use bright and repetitive graphics to highlight 20th-century singers, celebrities, and movie stars from Iran and the Arab world. These recognizable figures such as Googoosh, Oum Kalthoum, Princess Fawzia, Omar Sharif, Dariush, and Fairuz brought international renown to the region and their respective countries. Meanwhile, in Samimi Mofakham’s silkscreen prints, the Venus de Milo’s breasts are ‘censored’ with vintage Iranian stamps celebrating the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution and the figure of Albrecht Dürer’s Saint Sebastian at the Column resonates with the theme of martyrdom, which has a long history in Iranian visual culture and here especially evokes the devastating the Iran-Iraq war. While Mofakham’s prints explore the restrictions on words, images, or ideas, Rafiee’s depict beloved Middle Eastern stars whose longevity in the memory of the masses questions the very effectiveness of censorship.
As a whole, the portfolio reflects the push and pull between suppression and defiance, capturing the complexity of cultural production, political relations, and everyday life in Iran. In addition to their artistic practice, Tehran-based Rafiee and Mofakham also curate exhibitions under the name Bread & Salt Projects and run a publishing studio called KA:V Editions that specializes in art books.