“My dad has a tape collection of music from Iran. Lots of it is taped from the radio and he really clings to it and treasures it,” Sara Makari-Aghdam tells BBC Culture. Her father left Iran in 1974, five years before the Islamic Revolution, to study engineering in the North East of England. One of her earliest memories of understanding her father’s background was discovering the Persian pop cassettes from his youth. “He’s a massive fan of the singer Googoosh and one day he was telling me the lyrics to the songs… As a curator with an interest in Middle Eastern contemporary art I saw parallels and patterns between what my dad was into and the contemporary Iranian arts scene so I began joining the dots.” Makari-Aghdam brought those artists together in [Vinyl Icons: Persian Pop & Turkish Psychedelia](http://vane.org.uk/past-exhibitions/vinyl-icons-persian-pop-and-turkish-psychedelia), an exhibition showcasing work inspired by the music and film stars of pre-Revolution Iran in the 1960s and 1970s. The curator – who is of Azeri-Turkish, Persian and English descent – wove personal stories into the show. Three of the artists in the exhibition lived through the Revolution, while two are from the second generation of the Iranian diaspora: “It’s their story too,” says Makari-Aghdam.