Abu Dhabi – The National, October 24, 2024
Stuck in a tiny room deep inside Iran’s notorious Evin prison, Morad Tahbaz escaped the harsh reality of solitary confinement by creating art out of the grooves that lined the cement walls that imprisoned him.
“I would look for animal shapes within these lines and I would count them,” Mr Tahbaz said.
The Iranian, American and UK citizen spent nearly six years in Evin after he was arrested in January 2018 on charges of espionage. Mr Tahbaz, who lived in the US state of Connecticut was visiting Iran as part of his work with the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, an organisation he established to help protect Iran’s endangered animals and ecosystems.
Early in his detention, Mr Tahbaz married his lifelong love of animals with a burgeoning interest in art. At first it was a way to pass time, but it quickly became something much more profound.
“You just have to manage yourself and how you do it, and how you find interests and hobbies, whatever you can do to keep your sanity,” Mr Tahbaz told The National. “I started drawing, then I started trying to understand Persian carpet weaving, which I always had an interest in, and I didn’t know anything about it.”
Mr Tahbaz designed 40 carpets while in prison. He smuggled the designs out to his wife who then found a carpet weaver able to bring the prints to life. On top of the carpets, he taught himself how to do woodworking and engraving and constantly challenged himself to produce more and more works.
“I kept myself very busy. I really didn’t have too much spare time, and for me, that was critical, because my thoughts were, ‘OK, I’ve got to finish this piece, or I’ve got to finish that drawing, and what do I want to do next?’ So I always had a programme for myself, as opposed to thinking, ‘when am I going to get out of here?’.”
Much of his work focused on animals, in particular the Persian lion, which went extinct in Iran in 1963, a symbol of power and strength in Iranian culture. His detailed sketches, done in fine pencil, bring to life Iran’s once-rich wildlife. There are cheetahs and leopards, owls and elk, each one carefully signed and dated defiantly from Evin.
Art helped keep his mind busy and his thoughts away from the memories of his most recent interrogation or what his captors had in store for him next. In an exclusive interview with The National, his first with the international press since being released in September 2023, Mr Tahbaz outlined the years of torture he experienced at the hands of the Iranian regime.
