A Surreal View From Home

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 04| Order Here

On the internet, even the oldest stories are remixed into shimmering caricatures of themselves – fragments of identity passed around, exaggerated and adored.

There is a form of humour on social media that relies heavily on stereotypes and the shared language they can provide. For the younger generation, stereotypes are something to be reclaimed, overblown and distorted for comedic effect, used as a form of connection both between Iranians in the diaspora and those in Iran itself. Our own collective cliches have little to do with religion and politics: we send each other Instagram reels poking fun at our over-bearing parents with a penchant for the dramatic, memes about eating raw onions, photographic evidence of our cultural obsession with exaggerated beauty and plastic surgery.

In stark contrast to its thousands of years of culture and history, Iran is an exceptionally young country in terms of the age of its population, around 60% of whom are under 30. Far from wanting to move away from its antiquity, Iranians of all ages are proud of their heritage and its steadfastness in the face of conquering forces and the passing of millennia. Many of our cultural traditions are still pagan in nature: the new year aligns with the spring equinox and is welcomed with a decorative table of symbolic talismans. To mark the winter solstice, we stay up until dawn eating red fruits that represent renewal and resistance, drinking chai, and reciting poetry alongside family.

The internet is where these two factors collide and where Iranian youth go to express themselves as modern citizens of one of the world’s oldest civilisations. It has provided a limitless archive of references to draw from and play with – Persian rugs, camp strongmen, post-surgery chic – and allowed both artists and content creators to carve out new identities and push the boundaries of surrealism.

It’s perhaps unsurprising then that young Iranians are embracing AI as a means of self-expression and to envision new worlds. Motifs of Iran’s past, present, and hopeful future are warped and amplified, melted into a primordial Iranian soup of symbols and signifiers. Here, there is both a nostalgia for what came before and a sense of playfulness about what is to come.

Photographer Shahram Saadat, Art Director Sara Kabiri, Stylist Morena Salas, Hair Ali Pirzadeh, Make Up Abbie Nourse, Manicurist Megan Cummings, Set Design Sophia Willcox, Casting Roxanne Farahmand, Producer Sophie Hambling & Leva Kolupailaite (Gildon), Models Aria, Ayaz, Charlize, Dashti, Eman, Fereshteh, Lydia, Sharok, Sophie, Valentine, Special thanks to Thames Carpets