©Hannah Darabi
In the pages of The Secrets of Sexual Fulfilment, Mahvash – a popular figure among the working class of 1950s Tehran – presented playfully risqué images of herself alongside the fictionalised story of her life.
An audacious act of visual mischief, more sex manual than autobiography, this publication was a key source for Hannah Darabi’s Why Don’t You Dance?, which has now won the prestigious Prix Elysée international photography prize.
In it the Tehran-born ‘artist researcher’ – as Darabi, now based in Paris, describes herself – has woven together photographs, found materials, ephemera and contemporary pop culture, to examine how dance functions as both a form of resistance and a cultural barometer in Iranian society and the diaspora of emigres who left the country after the 1979 revolution. In doing so, she has transformed archival research into a reflective discourse on the body as a site of oppression and liberation.
Why Don’t You Dance? centres on three pivotal figures in the recent history of Iranian popular dance, including Mahvash, an iconic actress and singer whose self-made identity as a cabaret performer is fleshed out in The Secrets of Sexual Accomplishment. The second figure is Jamileh, who rose to fame a generation later via a similar route, popularising an Iranian form of the belly dance at home and in the US, after she escaped the revolution. And the third is Mohammad Khordadjan, a dancer and choreographer who built his career in California after also fleeing his homeland.
“Dance was a completely non-political element in Iranian society”
– Hannah Darabi
What emerges from Darabi’s investigation is not simply a nostalgic look at the vernacular of Iranian dance, but an examination of how the body has become a battleground in contemporary Iranian politics. The project gains particular resonance in light of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement that erupted in 2022, following the death of Jina Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police. Iranian women are increasingly using dance as a form of protest — breaking into spontaneous choreography in streets and public spaces — and Darabi’s historical research reveals the deeper roots of this resistance.
“Dance was a completely non-political element in Iranian society,” says Darabi in a discussion with Katie Kheriji-Watts in Episode #1 of Photo Elysée podcast, Conversations. “No one would use popular culture or music as a tool of protest…. [But so] many things changed after the revolution of 1979, especially politics towards women’s bodies and how women should be seen, and how they should express themselves, and even what clothes they should wear…. So popular dance and popular culture can become a tool of resistance, because that’s where Iranian women are expressing their womanhood and their bodies.
Darabi’s approach exemplifies contemporary photography’s expanded field, in which images function as one element within a broader constellation of materials. Creating what she describes as ‘collages’ of material, she allows different temporal moments to interact. This methodology proves particularly suited to this subject matter, revealing the continuities and ruptures in Iranian women’s relationship to public expression. “It was a very good solution for me, because I could put images from the 1950s in conversation with images from the 1970s or recent images. It can create a stage where you invite all these ghosts from the past to come and have this conversation altogether.”
This commitment to layered storytelling through mixed media reflects Darabi’s broader artistic evolution. And the theatrical metaphor proves apt for work that stages encounters between past and present attitudes towards beauty standards and gender expectations, illustrating how political freedoms have shifted across decades. Her attention to the construction of identity gains additional complexity when viewed through Darabi’s own position, shaped by her unique perspective as an Iranian artist working in exile. Having left Iran in 2007 to pursue graduate studies at the University of Paris VIII-Saint-Denis, she describes how distance from her homeland became essential to approaching these charged subjects.
A careful balance between subjective investment and analytical distance characterises much of Darabi’s practice, which has consistently examined Iran’s political and cultural history through the lens of visual culture. Her methodical approach to historical excavation is exemplified by her publication, Enghelab Street. A Revolution Through Books: Iran 1979-1983 (published by Spector Books to accompany an exhibition at Le Bal in Paris), which draws on her collection of propaganda materials during this formative period of Iranian history.
This project took nearly a decade to complete, and demonstrated her commitment to archival research as both artistic practice and historical recovery. Her subsequent work, Soleil of Persian Square, explores the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles through popular music and visual identity, further developing her interest in how Iranian culture adapts and transforms across geographical and temporal distances.
Darabi’s rigorous research methodology and innovative approach to photographic storytelling has earned significant recognition in recent years. In 2022, she received the Bernd and Hilla Becher sponsorship prize from the city of Düsseldorf, acknowledging her contribution to contemporary photography’s expanded field. The following year, her exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles photofestival earned her the Madame Figaro award, cementing her reputation as one of the leading contemporary voices examining Middle Eastern visual culture from a diasporic perspective.
The recognition from Photo Elysée, the Lausanne-based museum behind the Prix Elysée, represents the latest in a series of significant milestones. Begun in 2014 and supported from the beginning by luxury watchmaker Parmigiani Fleurier, the biennial prize provides eight artists with CHF 5000 (approximately £4500) to start a new project. The winner subsequently receives a further CHF 80,000 (£72,500) to complete and publish the work within a year. This significant support makes Prix Elysée perhaps the biggest photography prize for mid-career artists.
Darabi will preview her work at Paris Photo in November, which will be followed by a publication and an exhibition at Photo Elysée in June 2026. She was selected from a shortlist of eight international nominees which included Roger Eberhard (Switzerland), Rahim Fortune (USA), Camille Gharbi (France), Samuel Gratacap (France), Seif Kousmate (Morocco), Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombia), and Anastasia Samoylova (USA). The jury panel comprised of Rémi Faucheux of RVB Books, Clare Grafik from The Photographers’ Gallery in London, and Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of Photo Elysée, who praised Darabi’s “very promising step in the expansion of new narratives, offering an innovative voice to contemporary visual culture”.