sara sasani
Slow Progress

Woman, Life, Freedom is a comprehensive and rights-seeking movement by women that has recently occurred in Iran. It has been accompanied by many symbols and signs, and shaving or cutting hair is one of the prominent signs and symbols of this movement.

sara sasani
@sarasasanee

maryam saeedpoor
Pulsate with Rage and Blood

We are citizens of this country (Iran), but we cry tears of blood. We are mourners. Iranian women are crying for freedom that they have been deprived of. They have been oppressed by the family and the society they live in. These women face multiple barriers and discrimination in their life. The experience of injustice causes anger and isolation.

@msaeedpoor

maryam firuzi
In the Name of the Sun Land’s Girls

Last summer, I decided to make cyanotypes of the portraits I had taken of Iranian women. Although I knew that due to severe censorship in Iran, I would never have the opportunity to show them in my country, I wanted to at least print them. While printing the photos, I was looking at the family photos of my mother and grandmothers. Their photos before the Islamic revolution were often without hijab. They had experienced a freedom that I had never had. I started printing their photos without hijab and my childhood photos with hijab. And the photos I took of my friends sneakily in the nature without hijab.

Since I didn't have a light table or a workshop, I exposed the photos on the roof of my house in the 50 degree (celsius) heat of Tehran in the hot afternoons and then washed them. While I didn't have a hijab and I was wearing comfortable clothes because of the heat, I was always afraid that someone would see me from the street or from the buildings in front of me and cause me trouble. I hung the pictures on the roof with a rope, suddenly the image of the minarets of the mosque behind it created a complex mental situation for me. My childhood picture, the image of my mother's childhood, the image of my grandmothers' youth, the image of my friends' youth in that traditional religious atmosphere reminded me of so many cultural, religious, traditional and historical complexities that I returned to my house on the second floor and brought my camera to capture this image. For me, this picture was a mirror of the past 60 years of women in my country.

maryam firuzi
@maryam.firuzi

malekeh nayiny
Observations

In 1979, as I was finishing my studies in the US, the Islamic Revolution took place in my country. I moved to New York, hoping to be going back soon and working in Iran. As time went by, the idea became more and more remote.
 Fourteen years later, in April 1993, my mother died in Tehran. By the time I arrived in Iran, it was too late. The funeral had taken place, and my mother had disappeared from my life. With fear, sadness and apprehension, I stayed in my mother’s room for 10 days. Nothing had changed.
 Her sheets smelled of her body; her perfume. Around the room were all the untidy assortments of her objects that she had collected. Broken eyeglasses, empty lipstick tubes, combs, boxes of pills and paramedical apparatuses were scattered in all the nooks and corners. I was fascinated by how animated these objects still seemed although my mother would no longer touch them. It was then that I decided to take some of her belongings with me; without knowing what I would do with them.

Helping my sister and brother to relocate my father to a new lodging, I discovered that my father also possessed a cabinet de curosités. His was more organized, but just as eccentric.
 We were forced to discard most of these possessions, much to his discontent. I remember him sitting in the middle of his room, as we boxed his belongings, and muttering: If your mother were alive she wouldn’t have liked this throwing-out business.

I found myself once more attracted to these objects, incoherent as they were. Stacks of hand rags, dozens of empty cologne bottles, lumps of sugar; receptacles full of soap, passports, stamps, and old tin boxes were some of the items in this collection.
 When I returned to visit my father for the last time in 1995, I decided that I would take some of these objects with me. 
Impatiently, I have tried to connect images and objects and accomplish some kind of personal alchemy: to reanimate a contact with my parents, with my past. As though time had allowed these elements to complete their sedimentation.

As I began to construct this project, I had the feeling that what I was trying to accomplish was a prorogation of my separation with the past. It became evident to me that if I was to go forward with my life I had to somehow assimilate all these bits and pieces of my life before….

malekeh nayiny
@malekehnayiny

hoda afshar
In the Exodus, I Love You More

In the Exodus, I love you more is a record of my changing vision of, and relationship to, my homeland, Iran: a relationship that has been shaped by my having been away, by that distance that increases the nearness of all the things to which memory clings, and which renders the familiar… strange, and veiled. It is an attempt to embrace that distance and to turn it into a way of seeing; to let what is both there and not there shine through the surface; to explore the interplay of presence and absence in a place where the surface and depth often exchange looks, and to discover the truth that lies there, in-between.

hoda afshar
@hodaafshar

mitra tabrizian
The Long Wait from the series Border

Border focuses on Iranians in ‘exile’ and their untold stories. Reminiscent of film stills the work portrays fragments of the stories of the individuals who were forced to leave, regardless of whether they were politically active or not.

The Iranian new wave cinema, with its allegorical mode of narration tends, for the most part, to depict apparently ‘insignificant’ events in order to highlight significant hidden problems of Iranian culture. Similarly Border concentrates on the fantasy of return no matter how slight, only to indicate the underlying reality that ‘migration is a one way trip!’

Having interviewed the volunteers to participate in this project, what emerged, despite their diverse case histories, is that in the realm of fantasy they all feel as if they have ‘unfinished business’  and thus the question of ‘waiting’! What each narrative implies is the notion of ‘waiting’, used as a metaphor to indicate both the bleakness of the situation i.e. the futility of waiting - and a more esoteric reading of not having any ‘home’ to return to, even if things will eventually change; i.e the fantasy of ‘home’ is always very different from the reality of what you may encounter when you get there. In short, the concept of ‘waiting’ is portrayed more like Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot – rather than a realist interpretation.

However, within this unsettling mise en scene of ‘waiting’ what also became evident, considering what some people have actually experienced, was enormous resilience and the strength to survive - and thus survival as a strategy of resistance!

mitra tabrizian

nazli abbaspour
The Memories of Embodiment

Always when I encounter an art piece, based on the situation in which I am in, I have different perceptions. Like this photo, which has gained a new meaning for me after the recent events in Iran.

For me, this photo means: ”returning to the body.”

Over the years, in a traditional and patriarchal community, I lost the ownership of my body as a little girl, and later, as a woman.

This body is no longer mine. As an Iranian woman, I do not have the freedom of clothing coverage nor the right to have an abortion; even for having surgery in a hospital, I need the permission of a spouse. So this body is not mine.

I tried to put emphasis on my body, the body that in the social part of my life is invisible.

nazli abbaspour
@nazli.abbaspour

sahar mokhtari
The Others

This photo revives the movement towards light and hope in my imagination, movement that started in the distant past.

Come out amongst the light and darkness in a forgotten corner;
appear with their whole emotions, joys, fears, and sorrows;
stand in front of the camera, and be recorded again.

sahar mokhtari
@saharmokhtariiv

sima choubdarzadeh
My Name is Fear

Society will not be free until women are freed. This verse demonstrates that woman do not have an identity. Women and food both supply men's needs at the same level.

This verse from the Quran was visualized in this image.

   “On this day, all pure things are made lawful for you (as food). The food of the People of the Book is made lawful for you and your food is made lawful for them. It is lawful for you to marry chaste Muslim women and chaste women of the People of the Book, provided, you pay their dowry, maintain chastity, and avoid fornication or lustful relations outside of marriage. The deeds of anyone who rejects the faith, certainly, become fruitless. He will be of those who lose on the Day of Judgment.” Maedeh Quran 5.

@simachoubdarzadeh