"Formless, Female"
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| Ghazaleh Hedayat, The Sound of my Hair. Courtesy Aesopia. |
In the last few years, the international art world has taken up a fascination for Iranian art, making exhibitions of this art outside Iran more and more common. Iranian contemporary artists seem to have especially been gaining popularity among a western audience, often because of a politically critical stance and rejection of the strict Islamic laws in the country, which appeal to a western sense of relatability. The exhibited art is often seen as a brave counter culture against a regime that does not have the best image in western countries. But in the middle of all this attention, I feel there is a lack of contextualizing, international research on this art, especially when it is involved with politics. If we want to understand how a work of art can be subversive, provocative, or a threat to those who are in power, we have to examine how it acts against the logic of the dominant power structure. In other words, provocation depends entirely on context and the norms of the society it is based in. This knowledge seems to be little, if not absent, in the hype around many Middle Eastern artists in the West. Which is tragic if we realize that art inside Iran, even though thriving, is subjected to the watchful eyes and control of the authorities. If we want to grant some liberation to an art production that is -in my eyes- wildly interesting, to release it from being caught between international misunderstanding and national censorship, it is necessary to do research on a small, direct scale. We have to look at how art works operate and how they can be analyzed within their political context.
The human body is one of the most visual and noticeable domains in which power is expressed in Iran’s public life. It is a place of expressing individuality and identity, but also a place on which power, both subtle and explicit, is exercised. Interfering with the normal body-power relation in a society, is one thing. But in Iran, art itself is tied to certain rules of modesty: bodies on canvas or in copper have to obey the same rules as the bodies of flesh and blood. Since exhibitions belong to the public sphere, all art shows are checked, which makes it a difficult place to express critique. One of the strategies that young Iranian artists use, in order to make works of art about the human body without being censored, is separating form and content. A distinction between what we can see, and what realms of thought, association and imagination it opens behind our eyes. This is the first of three episodes, based on my 2016 master thesis, in which I wrote about case studies from different Iranian artists, all living and working within the borders of Iran, who use this strategy. This episode is about the work from two young artists, Ghazaleh Hedayat and Mona Aghababaee, who both investigate what it is to have a female body in Iran, in their very own, abstract ways. Doing so, they illustrate the thin line on which acceptable provocation takes place, the place of critical innovation and resilience.
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| Mona Aghababaee, Swallow Your Femininity. Courtesy Aesopia. |
Having been in Iran for this research, I, myself a woman, remember the immediate effect of the laws on my self-consciousness. As I had entered this state, the state had entered my personal space and dictated the parameters within which I could dress myself. The ideology of the Islamic Republic relates modesty to the veil, which is made to symbolize ‘inner purity’. It is appropriated as a symbol both for the traditional Iranian identity, contrasted with the decadent Westernization that supposedly threatens Iranian minds, and the Islamic ideological identity cherished by the Revolutionary regime. ¹ Form is therefore not just form, but embodies a system of value, religion, and identity.² The forms in which my female body was shaped, were not in tune with what I was allowed to show in the public sphere of Iran, and so they had to be hidden.³ Made abstract, in a way. The chadors on the street, though plenty of them were combined with jeans and lipstick, were quite effective in hiding the body of a woman, making its forms disappear in a formless black cloak. It made me think of abstraction as a part of the daily experience of having a female body in Iran, if you see it as the practice of changing and hiding certain forms, making a silhouette resemble something else than the body inside. You could even see it as a form of self-censorship, or body-censorship. Because of this daily struggle with forms and their absence in the public realm, it is interesting to see that abstraction is used in art concerning the female body, while often critically reflecting on the restrictions that rule over it. But how should we interpret this abstraction, given the context of each artist and the social reality in which they made their art? And how can it be political?
See the full article HERE.
Via Aesopia
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