When tyranny opens the door, the artist must ask why.
My fascination with Caravaggio extends beyond admiration for his paintings. His life and work contain a dilemma that has followed me through my own: how an artist confronts power without allowing power to determine the meaning of the work.
When Caravaggio entered the public stage with his paintings of Saint Matthew, he dragged sacred history down from its pedestal. Saints, martyrs and biblical figures entered a world of dirt, wounds, desire and death. His models came from the streets. His first version of Saint Matthew and the Angel was rejected. The Death of the Virgin was removed from its altar amid outrage over his treatment of the sacred figure and rumours about the woman who modelled for her. A choice that contained more than the visible.
Caravaggio was not a political dissident in the modern sense. His rebellion was pictorial. He provoked authority by refusing its idealized image of the human being.
His exile was not triggered by that confrontation, but by violence. In 1606, after killing Ranuccio Tomassoni, he fled Rome under a capital sentence. This created an opening for his detractors. For four years he moved through Naples, Malta and Sicily, pursued by enemies and by the consequences of his own actions. Yet he continued to paint. He continued to speak. Through his work.
He also longed to return to Rome. In David with the Head of Goliath, Caravaggio appears to have painted his own likeness, marked by wounds from a recent attempt on his life, into the severed head of the giant. David holds it by the hair but shows no pleasure in victory. He looks at Goliath with sorrow, perhaps compassion. The letters on his sword have been read as “Humilitas occidit superbiam”: humility kills pride.
The painting may have been intended as part of Caravaggio’s effort to obtain a papal pardon. If so, it was a petition made in the only language he fully possessed. To return home, the artist offered power an image of his own punishment. But the image exceeded the transaction. Caravaggio gave authority what looked like confession and preserved within it something authority could not control.
He began to haunt me differently since 2003, when my last film made in Iran was confiscated and I narrowly escaped an uncertain fate in the Islamic regime’s prisons. I do not place myself at his level, but I recognize something of my own predicament in his: the artist confronting power while power holds the right of return.
Caravaggio spoke through his work. That principle lies at the core of my existence as an artist. Art may confront politics. I cannot turn my work into political currency. This is why Caravaggio inspires me.
His story has stayed with me through more than two decades of exile because the border is never merely a border. In the hands of an authoritarian state, it becomes an instrument. The state decides who may leave, who may return, under what conditions, and what meaning will be attached to the crossing.
The illusion of an open door
Once again, the Islamic Republic is inviting Iranians abroad to come home.
The first major campaign followed the Iran-Iraq war. In the early 1990s, the government needed capital, technical knowledge and commercial expertise. Officials courted expatriate investors, industrialists and professionals and publicly promised that those who returned would be safe. The language was reconciliation and reconstruction. Yet while officials courted expatriate capital and expertise, the state was imprisoning dissidents and extending its campaign of assassination inside Iran and beyond its borders. The invitation and the violence belonged to the same political order.
The present campaign follows another war and serves another crisis. New measures promise to facilitate expatriate investment, professional recruitment and travel. The Ministry of Culture says it has submitted lists of more than one hundred cultural, artistic and intellectual figures whose return it wants to facilitate. Officials insist that an artist may simply visit, see the country and leave again, without performing or making any public gesture of gratitude. Optics devoid of substance. The laws remain. The practitioners of fascism are further entrenched. The threat looms in darkness and confusion.
The invitation arrives while executions continue, artists are summoned for opposing them, prisoners remain behind bars and families are punished for the speech of relatives abroad. The same state that speaks of welcome also speaks of “repentant” expatriates and threatens those it considers enemies. This is not openness. It is selective admission disguised as national reconciliation. I can only hope that the lessons of history are not forgotten.
An artist does not need to praise the state for the state to profit. No declaration of allegiance is required. An arrival photograph may be enough. A concert permit may be enough. Silence may be enough. The private act enters public circulation, stripped of motive, and becomes evidence in service of propaganda.
Return is not necessarily an act of betrayal. A person may need to see a dying parent, bury a sibling or walk once more through the language and streets that formed them. These are not small needs. Exile enters the body through distance. It is a parent growing older, a familiar street continuing into a future from which you have been removed, the possibility that a final embrace has already happened while hope insists otherwise.
But private intention does not determine public meaning. Under a regime skilled in appropriation, even an innocent return will become political material.
What history asks of the artist
History offers no identical cases or circumstances, but it offers warnings.
Marlene Dietrich rejected the Nazi regime’s invitation to return to Germany, became an American citizen and performed for Allied troops. For years afterward, many Germans called her a traitor. She accepted that wound rather than allow nostalgia to be used against her conscience.
After Franco’s victory in Spain, cellist Pablo Casals refused to return while the dictatorship survived. He died in exile. In Fascist Italy, Arturo Toscanini was beaten after refusing to conduct the Fascist anthem. He left and returned only after Mussolini’s fall. Their absence acquired political meaning because the regimes wanted their presence.
Sergei Prokofiev made the opposite journey. Drawn by home, commissions and artistic importance, he returned permanently to the Soviet Union in 1936. The state later confiscated his passport. His music was condemned and performances disappeared. The invitation home became a locked door.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s punishment extended beyond his films. After years of censorship and interference, he announced that he would not return to the Soviet Union. The authorities denied his son permission to join him, turning family separation into leverage. The anguish of exile had already entered Nostalghia. The state tried to retain power over the artist after the artist had crossed the border.
These artists were not saints, and their circumstances were not ours. Their lesson is narrower and harder: when a regime seeks legitimacy from an artist’s presence, absence is no longer empty.
Engagement without enlistment
Iranian artists face their own predicament. During the Constitutional Revolution, newspapers, satire, poetry and song gave the demand for justice a public language. Under the monarchy, expanding cultural institutions and individual artists coexisted with censorship and patronage in a delicate dance of evasion and suppression. After 1979, it was no longer a dance. It was a sadistic cat-and-mouse game. Control became a project of Islamization. Universities were purged. Music was restricted. Performers were blacklisted. Women were excluded from entire forms of public expression. Clerics and their functionaries acquired authority over what could be written, translated, filmed, sung and shown.
The Islamic regime learned that art need not be destroyed if it can be licensed, financed, redirected and displayed as proof of tolerance. Musicians and filmmakers stand near the front lines of this war because our work requires public space. A song needs a voice, a stage and a crowd. A film needs collaborators, money, locations and a screen. Each necessity becomes a checkpoint designed to neuter and subjugate the artist.
An artist must be engaged, especially in these circumstances. When women are denied bodily autonomy, protesters are killed, prisoners are tortured and citizens are executed, “I am not political” becomes an alibi. But engagement is not involvement.
For me, engagement means remaining close enough to human experience to bear witness. Involvement begins when ideology, party loyalty, state patronage, opposition politics or personal vengeance tells the work what it must say. Politics depends upon negotiated compromise. Art may negotiate its conditions, but not its conscience. That is the line I have tried to hold.
I will not use the trust earned by my films to sell an ideology or turn suffering into political merchandise. Nor will I use my position as a filmmaker to claim that I speak for the people. Art must not become propaganda for the state. It must not become propaganda for the opposition either. This dilemma is equally tormenting for those enduring impossible conditions inside Iran and for those suffering the alienation and yearning of exile.
Refusing to return is not abandoning the home. Nor does it require becoming a politician abroad. The artist’s purview is the work. From there, the artist can stand with the people whose voices have been suppressed, carry their memory, and refuse the spectacle of normality the regime is trying to stage.
I do not know what another person can endure. I do not sit in judgment over the artist who longs for a mother, a street corner or a grave. But refusing judgment does not require abandoning judgment itself. History has moments when ambiguity becomes useful to power. This is one of them. In the fog of war and amid the ravages of tyranny, ambiguity distorts principles and principled positions.
I know my own position. I cannot hide behind the “private citizen” mask. I cannot return while the state is killing Iranians and presenting selective homecomings as evidence of mercy. No embrace can erase the public meaning the regime would extract from my presence.
Caravaggio sought a road back to Rome through his work. Whether he would have accepted the final terms, we cannot know. What survives is the painting, not the bargain. He spoke in the language that power could neither exhaust nor finally possess.
That remains the artist’s responsibility in dark times: not to become a politician, not to decorate tyranny, and certainly not to whitewash crimes.
My position is as clear as my conscience. I will not give the regime the satisfaction, especially when it is calling the shots. Orson Welles said that a maverick may follow his own way without claiming it is the only way or the best one, except perhaps for himself. In my own contrariety, I understand precisely what he meant. I do not claim that my choice is the only choice available to an artist. It is the only choice I can defend. I will not return while the regime is killing Iranians and staging selective homecomings as evidence of mercy. I will not allow my presence, whatever my private reasons, to become political currency in its hands. No embrace can wash the blood from the hands of tyranny. Until justice is within reach of its victims, I will remain engaged with my country from the painful distance of exile, and I will speak through my work. This is not a judgment upon another artist. It is the line I will not cross.
In David with the Head of Goliath, Caravaggio placed his own severed head before power. Four centuries later, the terms of return remain recognizable.
Babak Payami
September 2026