While the post-revolution constitution proclaimed equal rights for men and women, it also enshrined conservative Sharia law, reduced the age of marriage to 9 years old ( later increased to 13) and restricted a woman's right to divorce her husband. This isn't to say that making art – indeed, living life – in Iran is remotely straightforward when you don't happen to be male. They're driving the scene in Tehran in particular. "Nearly everyone I talk to in galleries is a woman.
"I'd estimate that 40 per cent of artists working in Iran right now are female, higher than elsewhere," he says. If we want to understand the range and variety of art being produced by artists in Iran, it's time we looked past the Handmaid's Tale-style cliches, argues Afkhami, whose great-grandmother, Effat al-Muluk Khwajeh Nouri, was the first female artist in Iran to set up a private painting school for girls in 1932. One facet of the show that Afkhami is proudest of is the strong presence of female artists, whose works give the lie to the myth that all Iranian women live painfully downtrodden lives, denied any meaningful form of self-expression.
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There are also works touching on political history, including three orange-red neon tulips by the Tehran-based Mahmoud Bakhshi, whose "Industrial Revolution" series ironically repurposes propaganda from the 1979 Iranian revolution.
There are coolly abstract fibreglass and epoxy sculptures.
Some prints and embroideries on display pay tribute to traditional Persian and Islamic art and figurative painting. Though the show, Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians, isn't huge – 27 works by 23 artists – its range is impressively diverse, drawn from Afkhami’s collection of around 600 pieces. It's important to highlight a different side". Perhaps subvert it, too.Īs the man behind the New York exhibition, the Iranian collector Mohammed Afkhami, puts it, "so much of what we hear about Iran is about conflict, history, religion, identity – nuclear arms, sanctions, fanatic militants, all of that. Like that image, the show's purpose is to expand the view of Iran many of us have in the west. Taken from a series of the same name made in 2007, which captures the fashion- and nose-job obsessed young women Aliabadi encountered on the streets of north Tehran, it appears in a new exhibition in New York (and featured in a show at the V&A in London earlier this year). Even filmmakers and contemporary artists tend to serve up images of exoticised females, veiled and gowned and imbued with silent suffering, frequently shot in gritty black-and-white.Īll of which makes this photograph, Miss Hybrid 3 by the contemporary Iranian artist Shirin Aliabadi – who died in 2018 aged 45 – so playful and arresting. The international news media reliably prints photos of women swallowed by billowing coal-black chadors, who'd be impossible to tell apart were it not for the thin slivers of their faces. The are many images of Iranian women on offer in the west, but not often ones quite like this. Epic Iran: The ancient roots of writing Whoever this woman is, she is way more streetwise than most of us could ever hope to be. On the bridge of her nose, a dainty little plaster is visible – evidence, presumably, that an expensive cosmetic surgeon is on speed-dial. She appears to be wearing blue contact lenses her eye make-up is, of course, immaculate. The balloon of bright-pink bubble gum floating in front of her mouth contrasts with her stonewashed denim jacket. Her gaze is self-possessed, bordering on supercilious her patterned headscarf is immaculately styled, showing off her bleach-blonde locks to best advantage.
She looks directly out at us, her shoulders back.