Jafar Panahi's "It Was Just an Accident" Implores Us to Weaponize Our Laughter

It Was Just an Accident, Photograph courtesy NEON

text by Hank Manning

Jafar Panahi doesn’t have to look far to find inspiration for his films. He often portrays a fictionalized version of himself, a filmmaker speaking truth to power. In real life, Iranian authorities have twice imprisoned him, first for making “anti-regime” films and then for inquiring about the condition of another imprisoned filmmaker. He was released the second time after engaging in a 48-hour hunger strike, but continues to face restrictions on his travel and filmmaking. 

Although he does not appear onscreen in It Was Just an Accident, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it may be Panahi’s most personal film yet. His first feature made after his second imprisonment, he shot it clandestinely with a small crew in Tehran to avoid having to work with state censors. The resulting long takes and often close quarters give the film something of a documentary, true-to-life feel. The characters’ backstories, motivations, and fantasies were inspired by his own stay in prison—although he says he did not personally suffer physical torture—and conversations with fellow prisoners.

One night at his repair shop, auto mechanic Vahid hears a sound that has haunted him for years: the high-pitched squeak of an improperly attached prosthetic leg. It belongs to Eghbal, a prison guard who tortured him and other political prisoners. Vahid instinctively springs to action, trailing and then assaulting and kidnapping his former tormentor. But doubts arise—Vahid was blindfolded in prison, so he can’t be sure he has found the right person. He enlists other former prisoners to help him confirm. They likewise depend on secondary senses—smell and touch—to try to identify the man.

It Was Just an Accident, Photograph courtesy NEON

The members of Vahid’s ad hoc party—wedding photographer Shiva, her ex Hamid, bride Goli, and groom Ali (who was not a prisoner and is consequently the least passionate character)—use different strategies to navigate life in a brutal authoritarian country. Shiva initially hopes to forget the torture she endured and live quietly resigned inside the system. Goli, who faints when reminded of her imprisonment, persuades Shiva to at least pursue a confession and an apology. Hamid, filled with rage, demands ultimate vengeance: the immediate killing of his former tormentor. From the conflicts between the victims-turned-captors, we see the difficulties that ordinary people face in opposing authoritarianism. Unlike those inside the regime, who are either chosen for their lack of morals or carefully propagandized to not see the humanity of others, people outside the regime have a variety of morals and desired approaches. These large groups must balance demands for resignation, justice, and vengeance, making unified action more challenging.

Over time, these differences swell. Some passionate emotions subside into logical considerations. Vahid, who at first intended to bury Eghbal alive, becomes hesitant, especially when learning that Eghbal has an innocent wife and young daughter. The party must contend with the fact that their hostage is only one member of a large, oppressive system. They consider whether he can be blamed for following orders, no matter how cruel, or whether he is also a victim who had no choice but to do brutal work to support his family. Yet, if a man who commits violence against the innocent doesn’t bear responsibility for the regime, then who possibly could? But then again, even if he is guilty and deserving of the worst treatment, will enacting revenge do anything to help the group, if they can even get away with it?

The film is too honest to provide any easy answers. Individual viewers will likely align themselves more closely with one or another member of the group’s moral philosophy while simultaneously understanding the flaws in each. The film’s final shot unsettles every conclusion we’ve formed, leaving us to wonder if any sort of resistance could lead to a proper resolution.

It Was Just an Accident, Photograph courtesy NEON

The film inspires a surprising number of laughs. In particular, a running gag features Vahid paying bribes to security guards and nurses, demonstrating the way that corruption permeates all areas of society. We are reminded that no matter how horrifying authoritarian regimes are, they are also inevitably ridiculous. Since tyrants insist on being taken seriously, we cannot forget to weaponize our laughter.

Although clearly set in Iran, the key politics, such as the regime’s justifications for the prison sentences, are intentionally left generic enough so that audiences can easily imagine parallel scenarios developing under any authoritarian government. While the film does raise more questions than it answers, its one seemingly unavoidable conclusion is that authoritarianism, in any form, must not be allowed to take root. Even those who place themselves at the top of an oppressive hierarchy eventually meet their fate, as systems centered on ever-escalating violence quickly spiral out of control, consuming everyone within them.

A Disappearing Act: "Global Fascisms" @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt

View of ‘Global Fascisms.’ Image by Matthias Völzke


text by Arlo Kremen


At Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Global Fascisms is a mudslide. A terrific force leaking from a small alcove on the main floor downstairs, littering its debris across two gallery spaces and the hall that adjoins them. Quite literally too expansive to cleanly contain, artworks fill any available nook and cranny with just enough room and privacy to distinguish one series or individual work from another. With all wall text relegated to an optional booklet, the exhibition leans into this eclecticism—nameless, authorless, materialless works sharing spaces with no beginning or end, as though they are merely artifacts of the fascistic social conditions to which each work refers.

In this regard, Mithu Sen’s piece Unlynching: You never one piece (2017–) acts as a microcosm of the show’s sense of anonymity. Sen displays a variety of objects on a white wall behind glass with years penciled in next to broken mirror shards, bronze tools, and other ephemera. The piece refers to the violent uproars that have continued each year since the British partition of India in 1947, instilling ethnonationalism into the borders of an ethnically diverse people to enforce concepts of a pure national ethnicity. Sen’s objects were found in sites of ethnic conflicts, each speaking to the ever-present ripples of violent terror British colonialism left in its wake.

Mithu Sen
Unlynching: You never one piece, 2017—
Found objects and pencil
Courtesy of the artist

It is crucial to mention, if not already assumed, that the show’s definition of fascism is quite loose and does not fix the ideology to governmental institutions alone. HKW displays works concerning many facets of fascism and artist responses to fascism across time, from literal governmental suppression to symptoms of fascism on the internet, as well as in religious and subcultural contexts. Underscoring its breadth, the show traverses space and time with an aim: to locate the look and sound of fascism.

Walking through the show, a sense of desperation palpates. And rightly so. It feels as though there is no end to the pockets of fascism deserving of a rigorous aesthetic investigation, and yet, the show has a deadly, bleeding gash. A lapse so severe, it has impregnated every inch of the exhibition. An unfortunate predictability of a German institution, the Gazan genocide lingers as a specter. Palestine has one representative in the show from the Jerusalem-based painter Sliman Mansour, but the occupied Palestinian people are also mentioned in one work by Israeli artist Roee Rosen titled The Gaza War Tattoos (2024–2025).

Roee Rosen
Night Skies with Full Moon, 2024
Photograph
Courtesy of the artist

Rosen’s series shows a set of tattoos in reference to the ongoing “war” in Gaza. It features different tattoos recalling the deaths of Gazans and their means, such as the “mosquito” military procedure that uses human shields, and another tattoo, The Dreadful Dreidel, detailing the different titles the IDF uses to describe its military violence against Palestinians. Without question, Rosen is concerned with Israeli violence against Palestinians and is in active protest against its historic military campaign, and yet, why choose an Israeli artist over a Palestinian? The Gaza War Tattoos is one of the first works in the largest display space of the show, while Mansour’s prints are tucked away in a far less populated section, by both people and artworks. A bizarre decision for sure to prioritize an Israeli artist’s discussion of Israeli militarism over Palestinians, and yet, this has been a familiar rhetoric among not-quite-anti-zionist liberals and zionist progressives, if such a thing can even exist, who, over the voices of Palestinians and their political accomplices, use the image of anti-war protests in Israel as evidence that a morally sound Israel of the future is possible. What should be the prioritized subjectivity vanishes in an institutional disappearing act.

Sliman Mansour
Camel of Hardship, 1973
Print on paper
58 cm x 37.5 cm
Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

Mansour’s prints all predate the ongoing genocide, with the latest being from 2021, Olive Picking. Mansour’s work engages in the history of Palestinian resilience in the face of displacement, representing the lives of Palestinians, not under war or direct abuse, but in their perseverance to live their daily lives. Whether it be a woman picking olives, as in Olive Picking, or the variegated activities of a village scene overlaid in The Village Awakens (1987), he demonstrates life under occupation. This is particularly notable in Camel of Hardship (1973), where a Palestinian man schleps Jerusalem on his back, but in each careful portrait, his treatment of line and color radiates with hopeful futurity. Mansour’s work is wonderful and a worthy contour to a show concerning fascism; however, his placement in the show feels like a quota fulfillment—or a solution to institutional censorship.


Daniel Hernández-Salazar
The Traveler, 2013
Photograph on wallpaper
440 cm x 660 cm
Courtesy of the artist

Blown up to the size of the wall, the photo The Traveler (2013) by Daniel Hernández-Salazar captures a recurring motif of an angel whose wings are digitally edited, unearthed shoulder blades of unidentified victims of the Guatemalan civil war. The angel sets his hands around the shape of his open mouth with the words “SI HUBO GENOCIDIO” (IF THERE WAS GENOCIDE) in large typeface at the top of the image. In 2013, former president of Guatemala Efraín Ríos Montt was sentenced to eighty years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity. During the trial, Hernández-Salazar imprinted this motif on the back of public buses in Guatemala City as pro-Montt revisionists attempted to silence archivists and activists dedicated to his sentencing.

The placement of The Traveler is perpendicular to Mansour’s prints. The relationship between the works cannot be a coincidence—a work concerning the censorship of activists and the need to acknowledge and provide justice for the victims of genocide sits beside paintings about a people and land undergoing genocide and censorship. Assuming that HKW stipulated the absence of Palestinian art about the concurrent genocide and Israeli occupation because of Germany’s broad definition of antisemitism, this move by the curators is an ingenious maneuver—managing both to amplify Palestine through subtext, all while embedding HKW into the systems of fascism that the show aims to illustrate.

The absence of a Palestinian artist’s perspective on the genocide feels even more pointed given that the recurring medium of the show is video—the very medium by which this genocide has been broadcast on social media. The journalistic work of Korean filmmaker Yoonsuk Jung, commissioned by HKW for this show, is showcased in STEAL (2025). Created after the attempted imposition of martial law in South Korea, Yoonsuk Jung covers the eternal relationship between democracy, authoritarianism, and spectacle using footage from parliament assemblies, news outlets, and his own original shots. The artist works with the very media the Gazan genocide has been displayed to the West—and yet, Gaza appears only in the form of a tattoo.



Global Fascisms is on view through December 17th, 2025 @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10 10557, Berlin

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles Presents Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019

The first comprehensive survey in the United States of drawings and works on paper by the Los Angeles–based artist Paul McCarthy (b. 1945, Salt Lake City), Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019, reveals a rarely examined aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. Produced in thematic cycles, McCarthy’s drawings share the same visual language as the artist’s sculptural and performance works, addressing themes of violence, humor, death, sex, and politics, and featuring extensive art historical and pop-cultural references. By presenting his expansive career of more than five decades through the focused lens of drawing, the exhibition offers a greater understanding of this influential artist and social commentator.

Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019 features 600 works on paper selected from McCarthy’s archive. The works incorporate and utilize a variety of mediums, including charcoal, graphite, ink, marker, and collage, as well as more unorthodox materials such as ketchup and peanut butter. A consummate and accomplished draftsperson, McCarthy approaches his daily drawing practice as a way of thinking—a blueprint for projects and a tool to flesh out complex ideas. Since the 1970s, McCarthy has also incorporated drawing into his performances, implementing it as part of an action and often drawing in character. In recent years, this practice of drawing in character has become central to his large-scale video performance projects, such as WS White Snow (2012–13), CSSC Coach Stage Stage Coach (2017), and NV Night Vater (2019–). In a process McCarthy terms “Life Drawing, Drawing Sessions” the artist and his actors produce drawings in costume among the props and simulacrum of his film sets. These works bring together the materials and crude gestures that have been present in the artist’s work for the greater part of his career.

Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019 will be on view throughout May 10, 2020 at The Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Luis Camnitzer's Towards an Aesthetic of Imbalance @ Alexander Gray Associates in New York

In 1988, Luis Camnitzer represented Uruguay in the 43rd Venice Biennale, where he produced a series of works that combined physical objects, printed images, and text. In the context of the end of Uruguay’s military dictatorship (1973–1984), these works addressed themes of torture, abuse of power, and repression, combining seemingly disparate elements to elicit poetic interpretations. Despite political instability during the transition to democracy, Camnitzer agreed to participate in the Biennale, realizing that “keeping one’s purity could be in the way of more important things like the cementing of a regained democracy.” Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Camnitzer built upon the political themes in his work, developing new series and projects, including The Agent Orange Series (1985) and Los San Patricios (1992). Conceptually building on the work he debuted eight years prior at the Venice Biennale, Camnitzer presented El Mirador in 1996 at the São Paulo Biennial. Consisting of an enclosed room that is only visible to the viewer through a narrow slit in the wall, El Mirador evokes multiple spaces of confinement: a prison cell, a psychiatric hospital, and a torture chamber. Various objects are placed throughout the white-walled room, which is starkly lit with glaring light, lending the installation a surreal quality. In this tableaux, uncanny elements are gathered––an iron bed frame with a single glass sheet as a mattress, a shattered wall mirror, a house of playing cards, and a window with panes made of Astroturf grass––resulting in a hallucinatory aura, meant to destabilize the viewer’s initial interpretations.

Towards an Aesthetic of Imbalance is on view throughout Feb. 15th at Alexander Gray Associates 510 West 26 Street, New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the Alexander Gray Associates

Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon @ ICA In Los Angeles

For her first solo museum presentation in Los Angeles, Oakland-based artist Sadie Barnette (b. 1984) will reimagine the Eagle Creek Saloon, the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco, established by the artist’s father Rodney Barnette, founder of the Compton, CA chapter of the Black Panther Party. From 1990–93 Barnette’s father operated the bar and offered a safe space for the multiracial LGBTQ community who were marginalized at other social spaces throughout the city at that time.

Barnette engages the aesthetics of Minimalism and Conceptualism through an idiosyncratic use of text, decoration, photographs, and found objects that approach the speculative and otherworldly. Barnette’s recent drawings, sculptures, and installations have incorporated the 500-page FBI surveillance file kept on her father and references to West Coast funk and hip-hop culture to consider the historical and present-day dynamics of race, gender, and politics in the United States. Using materials such as spray paint, crystals, and glitter, she transforms the bureaucratic remnants from a dark chapter in American history into vibrant celebrations of personal, familial, and cultural histories and visual acts of resistance. The New Eagle Creek Saloon is a glittering bar installation that exists somewhere between a monument and an altar, at once archiving the past and providing space for potential actions. During the run of the exhibition at ICA LA, the installation will be activated by performances, talks, and other social events. The New Eagle Creek Saloon is on view through January 26, 2020 at ICA LA 1717 E. 7th Street, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Tandem: Alejandro Cesarco and Tamar Guimarães @ Alexander and Bonin in New York

The third iteration of Tandem, a project curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas is on view at Alexander and Bonin. Tandem consists of a series of five exhibitions presented over 2019 that run parallel to the gallery program, each one a dialogue between two distinct artistic practices. In the video gallery are two films by Tamar Guimarães, O Ensaio [The Rehearsal], 2018 and Canoas, 2010. The dialogue between the two works is framed by the changes that Brazil has gone through over the last decade – namely, the rise of new social movements, the reemergence of the political right, and the fragmentation of the left.

O Ensaio is on view from June 27 to July 25 and Canoas is on view at Alexander and Bonin 47 Walker St, New York, NY from July 26 to August 16 as part of Tandem: Alejandro Cesarco and Tamar Guimarães. photographs courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York

Marilyn Minter Presents "My Cuntry 'Tis of Thee" @ Simon Lee Gallery London

In Marilyn Minter’s video work, “My Cuntry 'Tis of Thee” (2018), women write the word ‘cunt’ into condensation on a glass pane. As the women articulate each letter, their features are gradually revealed as the steam hiding them dissipates. Minter reclaims one of the most widely acknowledged offensive words by providing the women in her video the chance to, quite literally, write it away from its degrading associations. The artist’s debut exhibition with Simon Lee Gallery and her first solo presentation in the UK in thirty years explores feminism and sexual politics through images that dismantle Western culture’s hierarchies of censorship and misogyny. “My Cuntry 'Tis of Thee” is on view through July 13 at Simon Lee Gallery 12 Berkeley St, Mayfair, London. photographs courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery London.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon Presents 'Relax Into The Invisible' @ LAXART In Los Angeles

Relax Into the Invisible is an exhibition by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon comprising works on paper, artist books, a new body of sculpture, and site-specific Supergraphics. These works build upon the artist's signature design sensibility while cleverly playing with language, feminism, symbolism, technology, mass media, politics, and personal narrative. Relax Into the Invisible is on view through August 10 at LAXART 7000 Santa Monica Blvd Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery