To Share a Stomach ran from August 8 to September 19, 2026, at The Brick, the Los Angeles non-profit art space formerly known as LAXART.
Aram Moshayedi curated the exhibit around proposals, instructions and letters sent by 25 artists living in Iran and carried out in Los Angeles by 24 American artists acting as their proxies. The press release dates the project to March 2026, when, in its words, the country was under daily bombardment and living through the longest internet shutdown ever recorded, and it describes the Iranian artists as people held back by “circumstances not of their making.”
Moshayedi does not hide the complications of the arrangement, acknowledging the unequal conditions under which the works were produced and asking what happens when one artist proposes a work and another executes it. These are the questions the exhibition permits itself to ask, but they are not the questions that matter the most after what has happened in Iran since January.
The internet shutdown Moshayedi’s press release attributed to the war was in fact imposed by the Islamic Republic much earlier than the beginning of combat. On January 8, 2026, the twelfth day of nationwide protests, the state cut the country off from the global internet; human rights organizations have described the blackout as an attempt to hide the mass killings that followed.
Never having fully subsided, the shutdown went into high gear again on February 28, the day American and Israeli strikes hit Iranian territory. The passive voice in the press release politely sidesteps these facts. In reality “circumstances not of the artists’ making” were very much of someone else’s. The exhibition’s founding sentence credits the war with the blackout, and everything else that is wrong with To Share a Stomach follows from this substitution.
The war did not begin the ongoing Iran crisis, but the widespread Lion and Sun Rebellion, as it is called inside Iran, attributed to monarchists did. On December 28, 2025, protests began across Iran as the currency collapsed and living conditions deteriorated; within days they had become a nationwide movement demanding the end of the Islamic Republic and restoration of the monarchy. On January 8 the authorities finally cut the internet while security forces carried out mass killings of protesters and bystanders.
Amnesty International describes January 8 and 9 as an unprecedented period of mass unlawful killings and calls it the deadliest period of repression in decades of its research; Human Rights Watch reports that thousands of protesters and bystanders are believed to have been killed. The counting is still going on. The Human Rights Activists News Agency had verified 7,007 deaths by late February, with more than 11,000 further cases under investigation; Iran Human Rights had identified 4,219 of the dead by name by September, 281 of them children. These figures are floors. The UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, said in January that at least 5,000 people had been killed and that her medical sources put the number as high as 20,000; a network of doctors inside the country, cited by the Sunday Times and the Guardian, counted more than 25,000; TIME, citing senior officials in the Ministry of Health, reported that January 8 and 9 alone may have killed 30,000. Khamenei himself conceded “thousands” in a speech on January 17, and the state later settled on an official figure of 3,038. The precise number remains unknown because the shutdown and the repression that followed it were designed to keep it unknown. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and the UN Fact-Finding Mission documented the involvement of the IRGC, the Basij, the police and other security forces, and in September the UN mission found that the killings took place in all 31 provinces and amount to crimes against humanity. The genocidal violence came from the state, which aimed it at its own population.
Those weeks opened a valley of blood filled with corpses between “Iran” and “the Islamic Republic.” To Share a Stomach does not account for tens of thousands of dead bodies murdered by the regime. It takes the March bombardment as the condition of its understanding of Iran; the resulting country is one under attack, cut off from the world, exposed to censorship and war, and represented by the testimony of artists who remained inside.
This is a more sympathetic picture than the old exotic, irrational country trapped between religion and geopolitics; but this does not make this new picture less misleading. Once the January massacre is left out of the frame of reference, Iranian suffering appears as something inflicted on Iran exclusively from outside by the US and Israel. For the exhibition and its selected artists, the Iranian population is the victim of bombardment and blackout, while the state that rules it, and had already been massacring its youth, recedes into the background.
When are we going to learn that Iran and the Islamic Republic are not interchangeable terms? The distinction is one of the central political facts of Iranian life. The Islamic Republic is a state with institutions, armed forces, ideological commitments, economic interests and an oversized apparatus of repression; the IRGC is one of its principal centers of military, political and economic power. This is why Iran or the Iranian society cannot be reduced to those institutions. The people killed in January had not been caught between their country and foreign powers. Many of them were demanding the removal of the system that claimed to speak in their name, which is why Amnesty describes the January protests as a popular uprising for dignity, freedom and an end to the Islamic Republic.
The Iranian population inside and outside the country belongs to several diametrically opposed political formations such as secularists vs Islamists, monarchists vs republicans, nationalists vs internationalists, reformists vs revolutionaries. There are people who want the Islamic Republic preserved and people who want it abolished, people opposed to Western military intervention and people who support it, people for whom Palestine is the central political question and others for whom the overthrow of the regime takes precedence. But to understand the scale of these contradictions, we can look at findings by GAMAAN, the Netherlands-based Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran.
In June 2026, three months after the war, GAMAAN surveyed 31,450 people inside the country. About a quarter of the literate population over 15, roughly 14 million people, said they had taken part in the January protests, and 71 percent of them named rejection of the Islamic Republic as their reason. Eighty percent of all respondents judged the regime’s handling of the protests wrong, 75 percent of all respondents completely wrong; the 14 percent who approved were concentrated among pro-regime respondents.
Asked about their political orientation, 47 percent wanted regime change as the precondition for any improvement, 23 percent wanted a structural transition out of the Islamic Republic, 10 percent wanted gradual reform within it, and 9 percent identified with the principles of the revolution and the Supreme Leader.
Asked what should replace the system, 34 percent chose some form of monarchy, 28 percent a republic, 13 percent the Islamic Republic as it is, and a quarter either did not care or did not feel they knew enough to choose.
The war divides the same population down the middle: 42 percent called the American and Israeli strikes military aggression against Iran and nearly as many refused that description; 38 percent had supported foreign military intervention both before and after the war, 27 percent had opposed it both before and after; 60 percent felt satisfaction at the weakening of the Islamic Republic, and 52 percent said the killing of the Supreme Leader did not sadden them. Views of Donald Trump split evenly at 44 percent each way; Benjamin Netanyahu drew more positive views than negative; 62 percent rejected the slogan “Death to Israel.”
Getting back to the exhibition, among its own constituency, there are artists who remain in Iran because they cannot leave, artists who remain because they choose to, artists who have left, and artists whose positions align with the regime because the alignment simply enhances their careers. Some occupy several of these positions at once; some refuse all.
This disagreement is the Iranian political reality with no “real” Iranian experience lying beneath it. An exhibition that uses “Iran” without confronting the disagreement turns the word into a container in which not only can incompatible positions be stored without the institution having to tell them apart, but one particular opinion can also be suggested to stand for the rest. The question of who disappears when the country becomes a single subject is masked in the name of its unmasking.
The proxy structure of the exhibition involving artists in Iran and Los Angeles makes the problem of recognizing Iran worse. An artist in Tehran sends a proposal; an artist in Los Angeles executes it; the work circulates despite restrictions on movement and communication. But the American audience never meets the Iranian artist. It meets a chain of mediation: the proposal, the proxy’s interpretation, the curatorial framework, the institution, and finally its own expectations. Each link translates and each translation removes something. The accompanying booklet, which reproduces the artists’ first emails and texts to Moshayedi, sets their proposals beside their accounts of life during wartime, so that the war arrives as the context in which every proposal is to be read. The question that matters is which Iran is left visible when the whole chain of work has been executed, and what had to disappear for the exhibition’s Iran to remain comfortable.
The exhibition asks its audience to listen to Iranian artists instead of Western media, while its Iranian artists are nonetheless assembled into a legible image of Iran by a mediating American institution. Moshayedi subverts their contradictory pluralities into his own preferred coherence so that an Iran of his making can be recognized. Thus, the Western gaze survives any new translation by gathering more evidence for its new version of Iran.
There is a further difficulty specific to the American liberal art discourse. The language of anti-imperialism is indispensable when it describes actual imperial violence. The United States has intervened in Iran repeatedly; Israel’s military actions belong to a history of occupation, displacement, military power and Western geopolitical interest that cannot be set aside. None of this disappears because the Islamic Republic has mass murdered its own people. But anti-imperialism turns dangerous when it becomes a sorting mechanism in which opposition to the United States or Israel produces political legitimacy by itself for whomever wherever. A state can oppose American power while repressing its own population; the Islamic Republic can condemn Israeli violence while imprisoning and mass killing Iranians.
The Islamic Republic’s hostility to the West also has its own intellectual history, older than any reaction to American foreign policy. Ahmad Fardid’s concept of gharbzadegi, later popularized by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, usually translated as Westoxification, treats all of Western modernity as a civilizational disease rather than a cultural or geopolitical opposite. After 1979 the concept entered the ideological vocabulary of the state. While Fardid cannot be blamed for everything the Islamic Republic became, that vocabulary cannot be translated into the language of contemporary American decolonial politics without omissions or falsifications. Yet this is the translation that an exhibit framed by bombardment and internet blackout invites. The show never has to say any of this. It only has to leave the state out of the picture; the audience, trained in that vocabulary, will likely supply the rest.
For this reason the exhibition title deserves to be taken seriously. Moshayedi has written that To Share a Stomach is his own mistranslation of hamdeli, the Persian word for empathy, which properly means to share a heart; del, the heart, is also the gut. The metaphor proposes intimacy across distance. The curator’s admission that the title mistranslates is more honest than the exhibition around it.
Whose stomach are we sharing? The American audience is offered an Iranian experience already selected, translated, arranged and institutionally sanctioned. The proxies in California producing the art serve as bridges, the curator as the translator, the organizers as a big gate, the institution as the frame, and the audience? They will come to the exhibit and receive “Iran.”
The exhibition wants to move Iran out of the Western center of the art world, as Copernicus moved the Earth out of the center of the cosmos. But Copernicus put the Sun in the Earth’s place and left the structure intact: a universe still organized around a privileged point. It took later cosmology to draw the full conclusion of the Copernican principle, which holds that no observer occupies a privileged position anywhere in the cosmos.
This is why To Share a Stomach is heliocentric. It rejects the old Western image of Iran and installs the Iranian artist as the new Sun from which the country can be known, inside an epistemology that has barely changed. Finding a more authentic center solves nothing because no authentic center is waiting to be discovered; there are only asymmetrically popular and competing political subjects and incompatible memories.
An exhibition cannot turn that disagreement into one Iranian voice without falsifying it.
The exhibition fails utterly by producing an Iran that only fits the needs of a Western art audience: vulnerable enough to generate sympathy, repressed enough to generate moral clarity, anti-imperialist enough to fit the politics of the room, disconnected enough to justify the proxy producers, war-torn enough to generate urgency, and coherent enough to remain legibly exhibitable.
Nobody at The Brick needs to support the Islamic Republic for this exhibition to serve the regime since its logic reproduces one of the state’s most useful assumptions: that “Iran” is a single political subject whose conflicts are best narrated through its confrontation with foreign powers.
The January massacres made that assumption no longer possible. The pro-monarchy protesters shattered the fantasy that the Iranian people and the Iranian state form one political body while thousands of them paid the price of this lesson by being murdered for it. Sorry, but their deaths drew a line that cannot be erased by placing “Iran” on one side of a geopolitical conflict. An exhibition that dates its Iran to March 2026 erases that line, whatever its intentions.
The task of representing Iran after January lies in refusing the demand for a single image rather than in finding a more sympathetic one, if not interrogating the illusory unity of the image that liberals and leftists in the art world, those either from Iran or from elsewhere in the art ecosystem, have hegemonized in the name of progressive politics.
That refusal or interrogation would be Copernican in the full sense: no artist, curator, institution, diaspora, state or audience occupies the point from which every Iranian experience becomes intelligible. Rather than telling an American audience what Iran is or represents, the exhibition would have had to put that audience in front of people who disagree violently over what Iran should become.
That is a harder exhibition to organize for career curators who often build their path through presenting the safe bets they make as counterhegemonic, perhaps why his exhibition offered no clean moral position and no reassuring sense of having met the “real Iran”; it leaves the contradiction of “sharing a stomach” with people with whom you may not agree.
The question, finally, is less whether an American audience can share the experience of Iran than whether the exhibition is willing to give up the pleasure of believing that it already knows what that experience is.
Moshayedi ought to stand in front of a mirror and ask himself whose stomach he was sharing: the people, the state, the proxy, the institution, or the image the American art world is prepared to recognize? Until he answers that question, replacing the Western image of Iran with a more sympathetic one only moves the Sun to the center and leaves the old white sky in place.