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BEIRUT, Lebanon In less than nine months, an assassin on a motorbike fatally shot an Al Qaeda commander given refuge in Tehran, Irans chief nuclear scientist was machine-gunned on a country road, and two separate, mysterious explosions rocked a key Iranian nuclear facility in the desert, striking the heart of the countrys efforts to enrich uranium.

The steady drumbeat of attacks, which intelligence officials said were carried out by Israel, highlighted the seeming ease with which Israeli intelligence was able to reach deep inside Irans borders and repeatedly strike its most heavily guarded targets, often with the help of turncoat Iranians.

The attacks, the latest wave in more than two decades of sabotage and assassinations, have exposed embarrassing security lapses and left Irans leaders looking over their shoulders as they pursue negotiations with the Biden administration aimed at restoring the 2015 nuclear agreement.

The recriminations have been caustic.

The head of Parliaments strategic center said Iran had turned into a haven for spies. The former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps called for an overhaul of the countrys security and intelligence apparatus. Lawmakers have demanded the resignation of top security and intelligence officials.

Most alarming for Iran, Iranian officials and analysts said, was that the attacks revealed that Israel had an effective network of collaborators inside Iran and that Irans intelligence services had failed to find them.

That the Israelis are effectively able to hit Iran inside in such a brazen way is hugely embarrassing and demonstrates a weakness that I think plays poorly inside Iran, said Sanam Vakil, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House.

The attacks have also cast a cloud of paranoia over a country that now sees foreign plots in every mishap.

Over the weekend, Iranian state television flashed a photograph of a man said to be Reza Karimi, 43, and accused him of being the perpetrator of sabotage in an explosion at the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant last week. But it was unclear who he was, whether he had acted alone and if that was even his real name. In any case, he had fled the country before the blast, Irans Intelligence Ministry said.

On Monday, after the Iranian state news media reported that Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hosseinzadeh Hejazi, the deputy commander of the Quds Force, the foreign arm of the Revolutionary Guards, had died of heart disease, there were immediate suspicions of foul play.

General Hejazi had long been a target of Israeli espionage, and the son of another prominent Quds Force commander insisted on Twitter that Mr. Hejazis death was not cardiac-related.

A Revolutionary Guards spokesman failed to clear the air with a statement saying the general had died of the combined effects of extremely difficult assignments, a recent Covid-19 infection and exposure to chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war.

The general would have been the third high-ranking Iranian military official to be assassinated in the last 15 months. The United States killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the leader of the Quds Force, in January of last year. Israel assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Irans chief nuclear scientist and a brigadier general in the Revolutionary Guards, in November.

Even if General Hejazi died of natural causes, the cumulative loss of three top generals was a significant blow.

The attacks represent an uptick in a long-running campaign by the intelligence services of Israel and the United States to subvert what they consider to be Irans threatening activities.

Chief among them are a nuclear program that Iran insists is peaceful, Irans investment in proxy militias across the Arab world, and its development of precision-guided missiles for Hezbollah, the militant movement in Lebanon.

An Israeli military intelligence document in 2019 said that General Hejazi was a leading figure in the last two, as the commander of the Lebanese corps of the Quds Force and the leader of the guided missile project. The Revolutionary Guards spokesman, Ramezan Sharif, said that Israel wanted to assassinate him.

Israel has been working to derail Irans nuclear program, which it considers a mortal threat, since it began. Israel is believed to have started assassinating key figures in the program in 2007, when a nuclear scientist at a uranium plant in Isfahan died in a mysterious gas leak.

In the years since, six other scientists and military officials said to be critical to Irans nuclear efforts have been assassinated. A seventh was wounded.

Another top Quds Force commander, Rostam Ghasemi, said recently that he had narrowly escaped an Israeli assassination attempt during a visit to Lebanon in March.

But assassination is just one tool in a campaign that operates on multiple levels and fronts.

In 2018, Israel carried out a daring nighttime raid to steal a half-ton of secret archives of Irans nuclear program from a warehouse in Tehran.

Israel has also reached around the world, tracking down equipment in other countries that is bound for Iran to destroy it, conceal transponders in its packaging or install explosive devices to be detonated after the gear has been installed inside of Iran, according to a former high-ranking American intelligence official.

A former Israeli intelligence operative said that to compromise such equipment, she and another officer would drive by the factory and stage a crisis, such as a car accident or a heart attack, and the woman would appeal to the guards for help. That would get her enough access to the facility to identify its security system so that another team could break in and disable it, she said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss covert operations.

In an interview on Iranian state television last week, Irans former nuclear chief revealed the origins of an explosion in the Natanz nuclear plant in July. The explosives had been sealed inside a heavy desk that had been placed in the plant months earlier, Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani, the former chief of Irans Atomic Energy Organization, said.

The explosion ripped through a factory producing a new generation of centrifuges, setting back Irans nuclear enrichment program by months, officials said.

The more recent explosion at the Natanz plant last week, he said, was the result of a very sophisticated operation in which the perpetrators were able to cut off power to the centrifuges from both the main electrical grid and the backup batteries simultaneously. The sudden power cut sent the centrifuges spinning out of control, destroying thousands of them.

Alireza Zakani, head of Parliaments research center, said Tuesday that in another case machinery from a nuclear site had been sent abroad for repair and was returned to Iran with 300 pounds of explosives packed inside.

In addition to setting back Irans uranium enrichment program, the attacks are likely to weaken Irans hand in indirect talks with the United States over restoring the 2015 nuclear agreement.

President Trump withdrew from the agreement, in which Iran accepted limits on its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions, in 2018. President Biden has made restoring it one of his top foreign policy objectives.

Israel opposed the agreement, and the timing of its latest attack, while the nuclear talks were taking place in Vienna, suggested that Israel sought if not to derail the talks, to at least diminish Irans leverage.

The United States said it was not involved in the attack but has not publicly criticized it either.

It would have been difficult for Israel to carry out these operations without inside help from Iranians, and that may be what rankles Iran most.

Security officials in Iran have prosecuted several Iranian citizens over the past decade, charging them with complicity in Israeli sabotage and assassination operations. The penalty is execution.

But the infiltrations have also sullied the reputation of the intelligence wing of the Revolutionary Guards, which is responsible for guarding nuclear sites and scientists.

A former Guards commander demanded a cleansing of the intelligence service, and Irans vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, said that the unit responsible for security at Natanz should be held accountable for its failures.

The deputy head of Parliament, Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, told the Iranian news media on Monday that it was no longer enough to blame Israel and the United States for such attacks; Iran needed to clean its own house.

As a publication affiliated with the Guards, Mashregh News, put it last week: Why does the security of the nuclear facility act so irresponsibly that it gets hit twice from the same hole?

But the Revolutionary Guards answer only to Irans supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and so far there has been no sign of a top-down reshuffling.

After each attack, Iran has struggled to respond, sometimes claiming to have identified those responsible only after they had left the country or saying that they remained at large. Iranian officials also insist that they have foiled other attacks.

Calls for retaliation grow louder after each attack. Conservatives have accused the government of President Hassan Rouhani of weakness or of subjugating the countrys security to the nuclear talks in hopes they will lead to relief from American sanctions.

Indeed, Iranian officials shifted to what they called strategic patience in the last year of the Trump administration, calculating that Israel sought to goad them into an open conflict that would eliminate the possibility of negotiations with a new Democratic administration.

Both Mr. Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif have said they would not allow the attacks to derail the negotiations because lifting sanctions was the priority.

In Vienna on Tuesday, senior diplomats said that progress was being made in the talks, however slowly. They agreed to set up a working group to study how to sequence the return of the United States to the deal by lifting all sanctions inconsistent with the accord, and the return of Iran to the enrichment limits set in the accord.

It is also possible that Irans response to the Israeli attacks has been muted less by patience than by failure.

Iran was blamed for a bomb that exploded near Israels embassy in New Delhi in January, and 15 militants linked to Iran were arrested last month in Ethiopia for plotting to attack Israeli, American and Emirati targets.

But any overt retaliation risks an overwhelming Israeli response.

They are not in a hurry to start a war, said Talal Atrissi, a political science professor at the Lebanese University in Beirut. Retaliation means war.

And if the repeated Israeli attacks had the effect of fomenting a national paranoia, an intelligence official said, that was a side benefit for Israel. The additional steps Iran has taken to scan buildings for surveillance devices and plumb employees backgrounds to root out potential spies has slowed down the enrichment work, the official said.

The conventional wisdom is that neither side wants full-scale war and is counting on the other not to escalate. But at the same time, the covert, regionwide shadow war between Israel and Iran has intensified with Israeli airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias in Syria and tit-for-tat attacks on ships.

But as Iran faces a struggling economy, rampant Covid-19 infections and other problems of poor governance, the pressure is on to reach a new agreement soon to remove economic sanctions, said Ms. Vakil of Chatham House.

These low-level, gray zone attacks reveal that the Islamic Republic urgently needs to get the J.C.P.O.A. back into a box to free up resources to address its other problems, she said, referring to the nuclear deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington; Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon; and Steven Erlanger from Brussels.

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Iran Rattled as Israel Repeatedly Strikes Key Targets - The ...

Saturday evening a large fire and a strong explosion rocked an Iranian steel mill in Zarand, Kerman Province, in the third such incident in less than a week. Officials said that after hours of battling the fire they were able to extinguish it without loss of human life.

Local officials in Zarand reported late Saturday that a blaze and an explosion engulfed one of the furnaces. The director of Zarand Steel Mill said several people were injured but no was was killed.

Three days earlier, an explosion and a fire in a refinery ten miles south of the capital Tehran became a spectacle to 9 million residents as it burned for 20 hours. No evacuations took place, and the government did not mention possible health hazards. Reports said that 20 storage tanks where waste fuel was kept completely burned.

Another explosion followed by a fire sank Irans largest naval vessel in the Sea of Oman, near it shores, on June 2. The government has not issued any official report on the cause of any of the three incidents, as the Islamic Republic is gearing up to choose a president in 12 days.

In all three incidents suspicion of sabotage, evident in social-media speculation, was inevitable with continuing Israeli threats against the Islamic Republic, following a series of spectacular attacks against high-value targets since July 2020 that are widely believed to have been the work of Israeli intelligence.

Irans main uranium enrichment facility in Natanz experienced two catastrophic attacks in less than10 months, with explosions and fires destroying crucial enrichment machines and inflicting serious damage in July 2020 and April 2021.

An interesting twist in the Zarand incident is a report by a local media outlet that said personnel were evacuated as the possibility of an explosion was predicted hours earlier and no one was present where the fire broke out. While this cannot be verified, an official of the steel mill said the reason for the incident will be investigated once the fire is completely extinguished.

According to local sources the explosion was so strong that people in villages and surrounding regions of Zarand were jolted.

Despite the fact that several videos on social media show the fire and the explosion, Ali Sadeghzadeh, the governor of Zarand denied any explosion had taken place.

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Fire And Explosion Hit Iran Steel Mill In Third Such Incident In Five Days - Iran International

Official cars are seen outside Grand Hotel Wien after a session of meeting of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on "Iran nuclear deal talks" in Vienna, Austria on May 01, 2021.

Askin Kiyagan | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

A nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran could send energy prices higher even if it means more supply in the oil markets, according to Goldman Sachs' head of energy research.

While it appears to be contradictory, a deal that brings Iranian barrels back to the market could actually see oil prices rise, said Damien Courvalin, who is also a senior commodity strategist at the bank.

Talks in Vienna are ongoing as Iran and six world powers the U.S., China, Russia, France, U.K. and Germany try to salvage the 2015 landmark deal. Officials say there's been progress, but it remains unclear when negotiations could conclude and oil prices have been seesawing as a result.

A deal would lift sanctions on Iran and bring Tehran and Washington back to complying with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018 and reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran which dealt a blow to the Islamic Republic's oil exports.

If that announcement comes in the next few weeks, in our view, it actually starts that bullish repricing.

Damien Courvalin

head of energy research, Goldman Sachs

Courvalin explained his rationale. He pointed to how oil prices rose in April after OPEC+ said they wouldgradually raise output from May by adding back 350,000 barrels a day.

"An increase in production is announced that is above anyone's expectations ours included. And yet prices rally, volatility comes down," he said.

"Why? Because we lifted an uncertainty that was weighing on the market since last year," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia" last week.

Investors wondered if OPEC would end up in a price war when it tried to increase production, but the oil cartel presented a "convincing path going forward," Courvalin said.

"You could argue the same for Iran," he added. Simply knowing will likely "lift some of that uncertainty."

"If that announcement comes in the next few weeks, in our view, it actually starts that bullish repricing," he said at that time.

Other analysts say an agreement could mean lower prices for oil, at least in the short term.

Morgan Stanley said in a research note that an increase in Iranian exports will probably cap Brent crude at $70 per barrel, and expects the international benchmark to trade between $65 and $70 per barrel for the second half of 2021.

Brent crude was lower by 0.13% at $71.22 on Friday in Asia, while U.S. crude futures were down 0.1% at $68.75.

"Our view is that the initial reaction to a potential deal will be a brief sell-off," Tamas Varga, an analyst at PVM Oil Associates, told CNBC in an email.

Extra Iranian barrels would be a headwind if a deal materializes, according to Austin Pickle, investment strategy analyst at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

But softer crude prices may only be temporary.

"We suspect accelerating demand and OPEC+'s disciplined supply response will support oil prices," Pickle wrote in a note, referring to OPEC and its allies.

PVM Oil Associates expects Brent prices to reach $80 per barrel by the fourth quarter of 2021, Varga said.

He also said it will take time before Iran starts to export oil again, and global demand could have improved significantly by the time additional barrels reach the market.

Extra Iranian barrels should only delay price recovery but not throw it off course.

Tamas Varga

analyst, PVM Oil Associates

While the global economic recovery has been uneven faster in the developed world, compared to the developing world oil prices will rise more quickly when vaccine rollouts accelerate in Asia, he added.

"Extra Iranian barrels should only delay price recovery but not throw it off course," Varga said.

S&P Global Platts Analytics has the view that there is room to accommodate Iranian and OPEC+ oil supply growth in the third quarter.

Toward year-end, however, energy prices could come under pressure as Iran exports and U.S. oil production increase, said Nareeka Ahir, a geopolitical analyst at S&P Global Platts. She said Brent could fall to the mid or low $60s in late 2021 into 2022.

Goldman Sachs sees Brent crude prices rising at a faster pace, and predicts the international benchmark could hit $80 by the third quarter of this year.

Courvalin noted that Asia's oil demand has been revised lower due to new waves of the virus, and that has been been offset by upside surprises in the U.S. and Europe.

"It really paints a picture where, once vaccination rates progress sufficiently, you really see pent-up mobility get unleashed, and a significant increase in oil demand," he said. "That's the root of the bullish view."

He said supply will likely lag the pop in demand, and there will be "plenty of room" to absorb oil from Iran.

"In fact, if you told me Iran's not coming back, our $80 dollar forecast is way too low relative to where the oil market is heading by 2022," he added.

Concerns over an Iran deal and the pandemic may have "masked a fast-tightening oil market," Courvalin said.

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Goldman says a nuclear deal with Iran could send oil prices higher. Not everyone agrees - CNBC

CAIRO Mysterious fires sank Irans largest warship and burned a big Tehran oil refinery on Wednesday seemingly unconnected blazes that nonetheless raised suspicions the country had once again been targeted by Israeli saboteurs.

The fires broke out hours apart as Iran was reporting progress in talks aimed at resurrecting the international nuclear agreement scrapped three years ago by the Trump administration, which the Biden administration wants to restore. Israel, which regards Iran as a dangerous adversary, opposes such an accord, contending it will not stop Iran from weaponizing nuclear fuel.

Revival of the accord would alleviate onerous economic sanctions imposed by the United States in exchange for guarantees that Iranian nuclear work remains peaceful.

Iran has sought to prevent recent acts of sabotage from derailing the nuclear negotiations. But it has acknowledged serious security holes and Israels infiltration abilities, including an explosion that wrecked part of its Natanz uranium enrichment complex less than two months ago.

Israel has tacitly acknowledged responsibility for the Natanz explosion and attacks on other Iranian nuclear facilities, as well as the brazen killing of a top nuclear scientist. It neither confirmed nor denied any role in the fires.

The blaze on the warship, the Kharg, broke out as the vessel was deployed in a Gulf of Oman training exercise. The Tasnim news agency described the Kharg as a training and logistical ship that had been in service for more than 40 years. The exact cause of the fire was unclear.

Military and civilian crews battled the fire for 20 hours before the ship sank off the coast of the southern port of Jask, Tasnim reported. The crew members managed to evacuate after the fire broke out and were transferred to shore, the report said, suggesting that there were no casualties.

The Kharg, also spelled Khark in English, serves as a naval replenishment ship and is Irans largest vessel by weight, according to an analysis of Irans navy.

Later Wednesday, a massive fire broke out at a large state-owned petrochemical refinery in south Tehran. Billowing plumes of smoke and flames could be seen from all corners of the capital more than 12 miles away.

The head of Tehrans emergency response committee, Mansour Darajati, said a leak in one of the pipelines carrying liquid gas had caught fire and caused an explosion, according to state media.

Iranian media accounts said at least 18 storage tankers were in flames and quoted Tehrans mayor as saying more than 100 fire trucks had been deployed from every Tehran firehouse to battle the inferno. Photos from Tehran also showed long lines of motorists at gasoline stations, reflecting fear of fuel shortages.

Although official Iranian media did not ascribe blame, the historical pattern was not lost on many Iranians, given the history of covert Israeli operations on Iranian targets. Just hours after the ship fire, the refinery blaze erupted.

We cant assess definitely what has happened it could be from structural damage or sabotage, said Saeed Shariati, a political analyst in Tehran. With our sensitivity there is always the possibility of an attack.

In April, an Iranian military vessel stationed in the Red Sea was damaged by an apparent Israeli mine attack, the first time Israeli-Iranian skirmishes at sea had affected an Iranian ship used for military purposes.

Political analysts outside Iran viewed the Kharg fire as more than a coincidence, even though some Iranian naval calamities have been accidental.

Obviously, the thing were all looking for is if the Israelis are involved, said Sanam Vakil, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, a research organization in Britain. The Israeli security establishment is using this period to define some new red lines vis--vis Iran and really demonstrate their capacity.

Israel, she added, has been sending a message to the United States and the region that it is willing to act independently in order to protect its security interests.

The Iranian port of Jask sits on the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane that leads to the Persian Gulf. It is an area where the fraught relations between Iran, the United States and its allies have played out. Beginning in 2019, ships in the Gulf of Oman suffered a series of maritime guerrilla attacks, crippling commercial oil tankers and spooking worldwide oil markets.

The United States said that the attacks were a tacit threat by Tehran to block the shipping artery and accused it of having targeted the ships with limpet mines, even releasing a video that showed members of Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps removing an unexploded mine from a vessel. Iran denied attacking the ships.

Yet Iran also has a history of naval disasters that are apparently unrelated to external enemies. During a military training exercise last year, a missile from an Iranian frigate mistakenly struck another ship near the same port, Jask, killing at least 19 sailors and wounding 15.

It may not be easy to distinguish clumsiness from obfuscation. Iran played down Israeli involvement in recent attacks in an effort to lower tensions and avoid acknowledging Israels successes, blaming instead internal sabotage.

Its bad if its their own fault, and its bad if the Israelis are behind it, Ms. Vakil said. Its embarrassing either way. So the question is: How are they going to spin this?

Vivian Yee reported from Cairo, and Farnaz Fassihi from New York.

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Fires Sink Irans Largest Warship and Ravage Big Refinery - The New York Times

LONDON The board game is roughly 4,500 years old. Shaped like a bird of prey, it has holes running down its wings and chest, where the pieces were once positioned. Its one of a few dozen ancient objects that were set to travel from the National Museum of Iran for a spectacular exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum here. But they never came.

Other artifacts that were set to be shown as detailed and illustrated and in the catalog for that exhibition Epic Iran included a gold mask, a long-handled silver pan and a carved stone goblet. To secure the loans, the museum was in longstanding talks with the National Museum of Iran until early 2020, said Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, also known as the V&A.

At a certain point, silence began to descend, and I dont think that was internal to them, he said in an interview. There were outside political forces.

Ironically, the overarching purpose of Epic Iran, according to Hunt, was to put aside the political tensions that have dogged relations between Iran and the West since the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of an Islamic Republic.

We want people to take a step back and understand that Iranian history didnt begin in 1979, he said. The point was to look beyond the paradigm of what is called Islamic fundamentalism, and concerns around nuclear testing and visions of the ayatollah, he added, and understand the richness, and breadth, and depth, and complexity, and beauty of Iran.

On display in the V&A show, which runs through Sept. 12, are an astounding array of artworks and treasures spanning 5,000 years: from the remnants of the earliest civilizations to the creations of contemporary artists living in Iran today. The full gamut of arts and crafts practiced for millenniums in Iran is illustrated with centuries-old carpets, illuminated manuscripts, miniature paintings, sculpted ornaments, court portraits and fine textiles.

More broadly, hostilities between Iran and the West were exacerbated during the presidency of Donald Trump. He pulled the United States out of a 2015 deal to curb Irans nuclear capability, toughened economic sanctions against Iran and ordered the killing in January 2020 of Irans most powerful security and intelligence commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.

Cultural collaborations between Iran and the West have suffered as a result, said Nima Mina, who taught Iranian studies for 20 years at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

In post-Revolution Iran, everything has been politicized, he said. Cultural institutions and artists had to align with a certain ideological and political agenda, as artists did in the Soviet Union, he said.

The Islamic Republic is an ideological, autocratic regime, so its difficult to be apolitical, even if somebody tries, he said.

The V&A is not the only Western museum to try and fail to secure loans from Iran. In 2016, a long-planned Berlin exhibition of works from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art was canceled when Iranian officials withheld export permits for the works. Half of these were by Western artists such as Picasso, Gauguin, Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon, and came from a collection assembled before the revolution by Irans empress, Farah Pahlavi.

Originally, the V&A under its former director, Martin Roth had planned to exhibit the private collection of the Sarikhanis, a British-based family from Iran who own hundreds of pieces of Iranian art and heritage. When Mr. Hunt took over the V&A in February 2017, he decided to turn the exhibition into something broader and more extensive, incorporating treasures from the collections of the V&A and other international museums.

One of the most important objects in the show has been lent to the V&A by the British Museum: the Cyrus Cylinder, a small clay tube from the sixth century B.C. that Cyrus the Great, the Persian Empires founder, buried under the walls of Babylon after he conquered it. Etched in cuneiform the writing of the ancient Babylonians the Cyrus Cylinder was a charter for good governance in which Cyrus pledged not to rule by oppression and dictatorship and tyranny, said the exhibitions co-curator, John Curtis, the British Museums former keeper of the Middle East department.

What the cylinder demonstrates is that Iran was a land of religious tolerance, and that it had enlightened rulers two and a half thousand years ago. The British Museum included it in a popular 2005 exhibition, Forgotten Empire, which also aimed to open Western minds to the countrys ancient culture and history.

That show received a very important loan from the National Museum of Iran: a silver tablet documenting the foundation of Persepolis, the Persian Empires capital city. The tablet traveled to London in the face of quite considerable press comments and complaints that the British couldnt be trusted to return them, said Neil MacGregor, the British Museums director at the time. In return, Iran asked to borrow the Cyrus Cylinder, which traveled to Iran in 2010, amid trepidation in London that it might never come back. (Those fears were unfounded: The priceless object was returned.)

As well as artifacts from Irans past, two rooms of Epic Iran on modern and contemporary art show that Iranians were active participants in 20th-century art movements, and today produce cutting-edge photography, painting and installations.

The high ratio of female artists on display including the photographers Shadi Ghadirian and Shirin Aliabadi demonstrates that Iranian women have transcended gender inequality and restrictions such as the compulsory veil to produce and display their work.

This final section of the show put together by the associate curator Ina Sarikhani Sandmann, whose family lent extensively to the exhibition also coincides with the most recent period in Iranian history, a period of revolution and still-raw divisions. Wall texts seem to reflect those tensions.

They refer to the monarchys authoritarian rule, its ties to economically exploitative Western powers, and its self-aggrandizing attempts to channel Irans pre-Islamic past, which incited dissent and led to the revolution. Post-revolutionary Iran, on the other hand, is described as being isolated and attempting to open up to the rest of the world despite hard line domestic policies and international economic sanctions.

The choice of words in reference to the Islamic Republic is very cautious, said Mina, the academic. He said it was probably out of a desire not to jeopardize Iran-based artists participating in the show. As a rule, painters, photographers, filmmakers, and sculptors in general had to be loyal, conformist, or at least not challenge the government to continue their art practice, he said.

Despite the loan setbacks, Hunt, the V&A director, said he hoped the show would pave the way to collaborations: The exhibition was always intended as a two-way exchange, he said.

It would always be nice to have a relationship with Tehran, which wed like to build on in the future, he added.

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Looking Beyond the Ayatollah to the Treasures of Iran - The New York Times