Slideshow, Second Episode: Khorramshahr Bears Witness

Slideshow, Second Episode: Khorramshahr Bears Witness is a solo presentation of photographs by the Iranian photographer Bahman Jalali, who died in 2010. It runs from 16 October to 6 November 2026 at Focus Room 06 in Tehran, within the Dastan:Outside programme of Dastan Gallery. Alborz Kazemi curates the project. Jalali's pictures of Khorramshahr in wartime are projected across two walls and two windows of the room, so the eye travels from wall to window to wall.

Slideshow is a series by Kazemi in which every episode shows the work of one photographer as projections in the room. This second episode follows the war in Khorramshahr in order, from its opening to its last days. It starts with troops arriving and fighters gathered in groups, and the fighting reaches its height around the middle of the show. In the final part the camera leaves the combatants for the emptied city and its ruined buildings.

A soundtrack runs throughout. Short recordings of Jalali talking about how he worked are laid over music and broken at intervals by noise. Peyman Houshmandzadeh supplied the recordings and Mani Mohebali designed the sound. In one remark Jalali sets his practice apart from journalism: “My work is not news reporting; it is documentary photography.” The Baygan Institute helped the project gain access to the photographs, and Rana Javadi, his widow, collaborated on it.

Born in Tehran, Jalali photographed the Iranian Revolution and the first years of the Iran-Iraq War, above all in Khorramshahr and Abadan. Khorramshahr, Abadan Fights On (1981) and Days of Blood, Days of Fire (1979) are among the books he made from that work. In 2007 the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona gave him a retrospective, curated by Catherine David, which Kunsthaus Graz showed in 2009. Stiftung Niedersachsen awarded him the SPECTRUM International Photography Prize posthumously in 2011, with an exhibition at Sprengel Museum Hannover, which holds his archive.