Disco Diaspora ★ From Tehran to Tehrangeles ♫

Disco Diaspora ★ From Tehran to Tehrangeles ★ Other Futures Festival
Saturday 22.11.25 @ Mezrab

Disco Diaspora is a cinematic and immersive multidisciplinary party that reimagines the dance floor as a space of visual, sonic, and archival exploration. Each edition moves across geographies and eras to trace the aesthetics of diasporic expression through music, image, and movement.

The first iteration at Mezrab, From Tehran to Tehrangeles, dives into the vibrant world of Iranian music and video culture, from iconic stars like Googoosh, Shohreh, and Leila Forouhar to legendary groups such as the Black Cats and Andy & Kouros, and Tehrangeles starlets like Susan Roshan. Showcasing both rare and well-known video clips from across decades, this four-hour curated program invites audiences to party while delving into the sweeping visuals of the Iranian music-video archive to (re)discover and experience the shifting soundscapes and imagery of Iranian pop from the 1970s to the 2000s as both a cultural and socio-political phenomenon.

Disco Diaspora: From Tehran to Tehrangeles creates a speculative archive of Iranian pop music, both from before 1979 and during the 1980s–2000s; A culture fractured by the revolution and preserved through fragmented traces. When pop infrastructures collapsed in Iran, production migrated to the diaspora, where artists often used low-budget but deeply resourceful channels to sustain cultural expression. Their music videos, though made abroad, returned to Iran via underground networks, smuggled tapes, and satellite dishes, fueling intimate gatherings and a shared creative imagination across political and geographic divides. This four-and-a-half-hour program of music videos reveals the remarkable breadth of diasporic production and the distinct visual and sonic aesthetics shaped not only by their historical moment but also by the new context of Los Angeles. Some clips absorb the city’s landscapes, atmospheres, and stylistic possibilities, while others look back toward an imagined homeland, visually reassembling Iran and Iranian cultural elements from within exile. Together, these works map the complexity of a cultural lineage that persisted across living rooms, community networks, and diasporic media worlds.

Disco Diaspora: From Tehran to Tehrangeles is curated by Katayoun Arian as part of the Other Futures Festival’s lead-up programming

https://www.instagram.com/otherfutures/
https://www.instagram.com/katay0un/

★

Doors open: 21:30-02:00
Tickets: 10 EUR
Student tickets (limited): 7.50 EUR