Image: Photo Elysée, Lausanne ; Hannah Darabi
Photo Elysée in Lausanne is presenting Hannah Darabi’s exhibition ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ from 26 June to 1 November 2026. The show brings together photographs, videos and archives by the Iranian artist, who was named the Prix Elysée 2025 laureate, and focuses on popular Iranian dance as an act of identity and resistance. The museum describes the project as rooted in the recent ‘Femme, Vie, Liberté’ protest movement and in Darabi’s broader examination of Iran’s social and political history.
According to the exhibition text, Darabi, born in 1981, uses image, archive and moving image to explore the complexity of contemporary Iran. ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ is structured around three emblematic figures of Iranian popular dance, creating a dialogue between past and present and between Iran and the diaspora. The museum says the artist builds series in which her images interact with texts, objects and archival material.
One strand of the exhibition centers on Mahvash, described as one of the first cabaret singers and dancers of the 1950s. Through her fictional autobiography, Darabi examines the role dance played as a tool of protest around the 1979 Revolution and the increasing constraints placed on women’s bodies and forms of expression. The museum also notes a collage series in which Darabi revisits Mahvash’s book ‘Les secrets de l’accomplissement sexuel’ (1957), combining magazine pages, text excerpts, ephemera and her own photographs.
A second section turns to Jamileh, known for belly dance and ‘danse Jaheli,’ a popular form rooted in Iranian urban culture. In this part of the project, Darabi stages questions of tradition and modernity through a set of three videos made in collaboration with a collective of dancers and choreographers in Berlin. The exhibition presents this work as part of a wider reflection on how performance can carry political meaning while remaining tied to popular culture.
The third figure, Mohammad Khordadjan, connects the project to the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles. Darabi uses his world to look at exile and at social spaces created outside Iran, including scenes from the legendary Cabaret Tehran, described by the museum as a landmark for Iranians in Southern California. Together, the three figures allow Darabi to map continuities between Iran and diaspora and to show how dance has moved across different historical and geographic settings.
Photo Elysée says the exhibition transforms entertainment into political act, archive into tool of resistance and artistic performance into joyful resilience. The project is presented as part of the institution’s Prix Elysée platform, which awards 80,000 Swiss francs biennially to a mid-career photographer for the development of an original project. The museum lists Lydia Dorner as curator, with scenography by Amanda Antunes and graphics by Unstated International.
The exhibition runs alongside Photo Elysée’s other current shows, ‘Ella Maillart. Récits photographiques’ and ‘Alfredo Jaar. Inferno & Paradiso’. A guided tour of ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ in French is scheduled for Sunday, 12 July, from 10 to 11 am, with registration required and free admission with a ticket.
