[custom_adv] What a party! For three nights in a row, dancers, performers, half-naked figures in shaggy red costumes and fantastic creatures shackled to one another writhed through the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) while scantily clad men danced in front of a painting by Picasso. [custom_adv] In the midst of it all were the Shah and his wife FarahDiba, Empress of Iran and initiator of the museum. While Iran's ruler had more of a penchant for tanks and fast cars, he joined his wife for a night at the museum - and an embarrassing moment. [custom_adv] That night in 1977 was like no other in Iran, before or after. Celebrities from around the world - including the US vice president - traveled to Tehran for the opening of a museum designed to be a symbol, putting the country - oriented toward the West at that time - firmly on the map of international art, and amazing the world with a unique collection. [custom_adv] "I was very young and at the time, I didn't know much about the art being celebrated there," says Jila Dejam, who had the only official license to take photos at the museum. She shudders, however, when remembering the moment when Shah Reza Pahlavi stopped to look at a Japanese artist's work, a basin filled with a shiny black liquid. [custom_adv] Before the revolution, evidenced by Dejam’s photographs, Iran indeed had an aesthetic dialogue with the west. The TMoCA building itself, designed by the empress’s cousin, Kamran Diba, is an amalgam of Persian and Western styles, with a winding interior walkway that screams “Guggenheim New York.” [custom_adv] The opening was met with much fanfare from the public, who are immortalized wearing the same wide collars, bell-bottoms, and bushy mustaches as their American counterparts at the time. [custom_adv] Dejam captured the vernissage crowd packed into the museum and its courtyard, watching a number of performances that are, unfortunately, unidentified. [custom_adv] Performers in costume—two in red bodysuits with fringed wings, for example, or two men in leather vests and white disco pants—part crowds with actions that the contemporary viewer can only speculate on what they could have entailed. [custom_adv] Farah Diba Pahlavi looking at George Braque’s Guitare, fruits et pichet (1927). Photo ©Jila Dejam, courtesy the artist and Box Freiraum.The photos also show the days leading up to the opening. On one wall, a series of four in black and white capture the installation of Noriyuki Haraguchi’s first Oil Pool, which debuted at Documenta 6 in 1977, and has been on view at the TMoCA since day one. [custom_adv] Art handlers carefully pour large tubs of oil into a large, low pool, creating eerie scenes that evoke more of a feeling of some sort of mystical ritual or crime scene, rather than an artwork being installed. [custom_adv] On another wall, a glamorous Farah Diba is seen examining Jackson Pollock’s 1950 Mural on Indian Red Ground, and George Braque’s 1927 still-life Guitare, fruits et pichet. Part documentary and part artworks in their own right, Dejam’s exhibition shows the TMoCA in a way that is truly rare. [custom_adv] The shah laughed in disbelief when he was told the liquid was oil, and stuck his arm into the canister - only to pull it out, soiled and oozing black oil. Someone snapped a picture, but within seconds, the notorious Savak secret police had confiscated every roll of film taken that night. [custom_adv] So there are no photos from the opening night at the TMoCA - but plenty of pictures of the party nights that were to follow.Photographers live dangerously in Iran - they do now and they did then. The emergence in Berlin of 40 marvelous documentary photographs from the late 70s in Iran is particularly surprising, as few people even knew they existed. [custom_adv] Jila Dejam, 64, kept them hidden for decades. "I've protected my photos for 40 years," Dejam says, adding that they are priceless. But the time has come for these "contemporary documents to finally come to light, and help come to terms with Iran's history," Dejam argues. [custom_adv] Jila Dejam peers at Berlin's "Box Freiraum" art location with great pleasure. Her black-and-white photos look good on the rust-colored walls of what once was a horse stable, much more so than in any White Cube environment. The photographer has never before seen her work in such a setting - framed and hung on walls. [custom_adv] Iran expert Anahita von Plotho chose 40 pictures for the exhibition, but the photographer has hundreds more.Jila Dejam points out what she regards as one of her best works, a photo that shows Farah Diba bowed over the portrait of a woman as if flirting with the artwork. [custom_adv] The photographer remembers the opening night of the museum four decades ago. She noticed even back then that people from different social levels were present, veiled women and the intellectual elite. "It was baffling to me, but I sensed possible clashes."