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So we can look at someone like sirak melkonian — his work, "veiled woman", won the first prize of the very first tehran biennal in 1958. he has explored local idioms and nuances, and his portrayal on these flat washes of colour of a woman emerging from a bathhouse in downtown tehran, looking at you sideways, really exemplifies the kind of exploration that artists were interested in doing then. the incredible thing is that there is this misnomer in western art history that modernism was something that was invented in the west, and then exported like a good around the world. whereas, in fact, ...

Voices, lots of different political voices. clearly not everyone was monarchist, there were anti—monarchists, marxists, socialists, islamicists, republicans, all working within this field and giving their own voice. so we wanted to represent that dynamic period of modernism, when iranian artists were really exploring different ways of expressing their own modernity. we have oil paintings, and sculpture, and photography. we have film, installation work, and animation. and over half our artists are women, so really creating a very dynamic voice. within the era of modernism, it's interesting to...

Is that isma'iljalayir wouldn't have had access, so he's been given photographs of them in order to create the painting. that sort of leads us through to the 20th century — and there, we show examples of the art of iran after in the 1940s, and how iran in the 1960s and '70s developed a form of modernism that was in tune with international movements, but also had artists who were creating specifically iranian works of art. and now, it's time to see some masterpieces of the modern period. there's two really great and important stories to tell. one, of course, is how dynamic modernity was in ir...

You had many different art schools and academies, you had private galleries, you had, by the early �*50s, 700 newspapers, public television — which was a very radical public television programme — and you had art fairs and the shiraz persepolis festival. within that period, there were lots of different voices, political voices. clearly not everyone was monarchist, there were anti—monarchists, marxists, socialists, islamicists, republicans all working within this field and giving their own voice. so we wanted to represent that dynamic period of modernism, when iranian artists were reall...

The incredible thing is, there is this misnomer in western art history that modernism was something that was invented in the west, and then exported like a good around the world. whereas, in fact, in the kind of transnational modernisms that are being explored now, we re—understand the story differently. and it's great to have this moment to establish the huge variety of modernism within iran in the 20th century. iran positioned itself firmly on the global stage — so we had artists that moved westward and looked, and reinvented, but we also look had artists who looked eastward. and who mor...