3 Days to Liberation II

Available here: COMBI PASS SATURDAY AT GRÜNER SALON: €13 / reduced €10 / valid for both events on Saturday, 13 December: Women Who Said No (film) at 2:30 p.m. and Against Violence (panel) at 4:00 p.m.

Part of the programme
3 DAYS TO LIBERATION II
(Statement and program)
12–14 December 2025
Conceived & curated by Maryam Palizban
Presented by CONSTANZA MACRAS / DORKY PARK

Parastou Forouhar in conversation with Sepehr Atefi & Maryam Palizban

At a time when violence keeps asserting itself as the language of power, talking about justice is an act of resistance. This panel addresses the question whether memory, complaint, and testimony might constitute a new form of justice that is not tied in with violence. In the context of 3 Days to Liberation II, this conversation is more than just talk. It is part of the ongoing search for an ethics of liberation that could reinscribe individual experience into the collective body of history. How should we talk about violence without re-enacting and repeating violence? How can we make pain visible without exploiting it?

The panel addresses the question of whether a non-violent form of justice is possible in the face of systematic oppression, political persecution, and structural violence. We ask how memory, testimony, and the individual experience of political violence can be integrated into a collective narrative. Our focus is on the story of Parastou Forouhar, who has been the target of political violence and, for decades, has been fighting untiringly for justice. In conversation with Sepehr Atefi, she discusses how victims of political persecution can shed light on stories of violence, redefine justice, and yet avoid resorting to new violence in the process. Panel moderator Maryam Palizban offers a space for individual testimony and collective memory to discuss the meaning of justice amid global conflicts and confrontations.

Parastou Forouhar was born in Tehran in 1962. She has lived and worked in Germany since 1991. Studying art at Tehran University, she continued her studies in Germany after her departure from Iran. Her parents, opposition politicians Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar, were murdered in Tehran in 1998 – an atrocious event that has influenced her artistic work and political stance ever since. Forouhar’s work blends the personal with the political; what we see with what is repressed. She uses drawing, photography, installation, and digital media to explore the fine lines between freedom and conformity, belief and power, individual body and political system. Transforming familiar forms from Persian pictorial traditions into mirrors reflecting our present, she creates images of torture, coercion and being silenced from floral patterns and artful miniatures—not as a shock tactic, but as a reminder of how easily violence can establish itself as instrument of social order. In her work, Forouhar brings together art, politics and remembrance culture, and once a year she travels back to Iran to keep the memory of her parents alive and demand the legal investigation into their assassination, in spite of restrictions and security risks.

Sepehr Atefi is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. Born in Iran in 1989, he lives in Germany. He was excluded from higher education in Iran due to his membership in the Bahá’í community, and left the country for Germany as a political refugee in 2010. He holds a master’s degree in media arts from the Bauhaus University in Weimar.

Maryam Palizban is a theatre studies scholar, artist, curator and actor. Born in 1981 in Iran, she lives and works in Berlin. In 2014 she earned her doctorate from Freie Universität Berlin / Centre for literary and cultural research (ZfL) with a thesis on The Performativity of Murder, a study on martyrdom and Shiite ritual theatre practice. As an actor, she has gained prominence in Iran through films such as Deep Breath (Cannes 2003), Fat Shaker (Rotterdam 2013, Tiger Award), and Lantouri (Berlinale 2016; Iranian Film Academy Award). Her engagement with the Jina Revolution led her to pursue her projects abroad, which has since shaped her artistic and curatorial work

Event language: English