Iran University of Science and Technology. Photo: Ugi in iust at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IUST_GATE.jpg)
Iran University of Science and Technology. Photo: Ugi in iust at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IUST_GATE.jpg)
(A collection of fifty-two weekly cartoons addressing huma...)
A collection of fifty-two weekly cartoons addressing human-rights issues during Persian Solar Year 1391, corresponding to 2012–2013 and the final year of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency. Neyestani created the cartoons, and the volume documents his use of political caricature to address repression and censorship.
https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/5016387-drawing-repression-hardcover
2014
architect blogger caricaturist educator
Touka Neyestani was born in 1960 in Shahrud, Iran. He is the son of Manouchehr Neyestani, an Iranian poet, and the elder brother of cartoonist Mana Neyestani. His family’s literary and artistic environment connected him with Iranian poetry, drawing, and illustrated publications from an early age.
Neyestani studied architecture at Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran, an institution established as a technical college in the 1920s and later developed into a major Iranian university of engineering and science. He completed a degree in architecture, although his professional life developed chiefly through press cartooning and graphic art rather than architectural practice.
His early artistic formation also came through the Iranian periodical press. At eighteen, he began publishing cartoons in Ketab Jomeh, the weekly edited by the poet Ahmad Shamlou, whose short run after the 1979 Revolution made it an important forum for literary and visual culture.
Neyestani began his professional press career in 1979 with the weekly Ketab Jomeh, where his cartoons were published under the editorship of Ahmad Shamlou. He later contributed to Iranian publications including Transportation Industry and collaborated with more than forty Iranian newspapers and other periodicals. His early work combined journalistic observation with dense black-and-white drawing and became associated with a sharply critical style.
Between 2006 and 2010, Neyestani served on the Board of Trustees of the Tehran Caricature House and worked there as a drawing instructor. The institution was a specialized Iranian center devoted to caricature exhibitions, education, and professional exchange. His teaching and organizational work complemented a career that included more than thirty years of cartoon drawing and instruction.
Neyestani left Iran in 2010 and settled in Toronto, Canada. In Canada he worked as a freelance cartoonist for Rooz Online and the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, while also contributing to IranWire from 2013. His cartoons address censorship, political repression, social inequality, state violence, and the contradictions of public life in Iran; he has also produced work for Nebel Spalter, a Swiss weekly publication.
In 2021, Neyestani created Cat and Mouse, a graphic adaptation of the medieval Persian satirical poem by Ubayd Zakani. The work recasts the conflict between an oppressive cat and rebellious mice as an allegorical story with contemporary political resonance. His visual language uses expressive figures, hatching, and dark humor to connect traditional Persian satire with modern editorial cartooning.
Neyestani’s cartoons have been published in more than forty Iranian newspapers and in more than sixty publications during his career, establishing him as a sustained contributor to Iranian and international press cartooning.
He developed a distinctive black-and-white cartoon style using dense hatching, dark humor, and allegorical composition to address censorship, political repression, and social conditions.
(A collection of fifty-two weekly cartoons addressing huma...)
2014(A yearbook presenting Neyestani’s editorial cartoons and ...)
2013(An illustrated graphic adaptation of Ubayd Zakani’s medie...)
2021Neyestani views political cartooning as a form of social observation and criticism. He has argued that a cartoon selects and emphasizes part of reality, including realities that may be unpleasant or ignored, and that criticism is weakened when artists reproduce only the opinions their audiences already favor.
His work reflects a sustained concern with censorship, freedom of expression, political repression, and the relationship between humor and public debate. He has also described the press cartoon as part of social and media history, capable of preserving evidence about the political conditions of its time.
In interviews, Neyestani presents cartooning as a critical practice concerned with reality, public responsibility, and the right to question political authority. He has described his preference for examining uncomfortable or neglected aspects of social life rather than accepting official or popular consensus.
Quotes from others about the person
Ahmad Shamlou published Neyestani’s early cartoons in Ketab Jomeh when Neyestani was eighteen; Neyestani later described that publication as his greatest professional success.
Drawing, political satire, caricature, graphic storytelling, and architecture.
Ubayd Zakani is connected with Neyestani’s creative interests through his illustrated adaptation of Zakani’s satirical poem The Mice and the Cat.
Neyestani has identified the Iranian singer Googoosh as a favorite and has discussed her music in relation to his adolescence and his later cartoon criticism.
Neyestani is the son of Manouchehr Neyestani, a poet, and the brother of Mana Neyestani, an Iranian cartoonist and political satirist. Mana has described Touka as his elder brother and an important source of encouragement during his own early development as a cartoonist.
