Women living "life without a life"

Iranian artist Farzaneh Khademian's "Peephole"

In her latest exhibition in Japan, Farzaneh Khademian depicts figures who seem detached from their surroundings. In interview with Qantara.de, the Iranian photographer and painter explains the impact of photography, migration and gender-based inequality on her paintings.

Painting from the "Peephole" series by Farzaneh Khademian (photo: Farzaneh Khademian. Courtesy Qantara).
In November 2021, Khademian's second exhibition in Japan, called "Peephole", opened in Tokyo, displaying naked, faceless figures. In the introduction to her exhibition, she wrote: "Peephole is a small opening through a door allowing the viewer to look from the inside to the outside in the same way that a camera lens does. In this series, I tried to look at my surroundings through this lens".

 

by Changiz M. Varzi, Qantara

In 2016, acclaimed Iranian photojournalist and painter Farzaneh Khademian emigrated to Japan and entered a world fundamentally different from her home country, Iran. Khademian was born and raised in the capital Tehran; she was seven years old when the Islamic Revolution changed all aspects of life in Iran. She belongs to a generation of photographers who graduated from art universities, but decided to use their cameras to document social and political themes.

In 1995, she entered Azad University Art School, where she studied photography. Immediately after her graduation, at the height of the late 1990s reform movement in Iran, she was one of the pioneering photographers who covered the 1999 students uprising, the assassination of senior reformist theorist Saeed Hajjarian, and many protests in support of the then-president Mohammad Khatami.

At the same time, she focused on documenting women’s life in Iran. One widely acclaimed project was about female passengers on the women-only section of public city buses in Tehran. In another, she took photos of women athletes when covering women sportspersons was still a taboo in Iran. She also covered various topics in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Pakistan for international outlets.

How Oscar-tipped Iranian drama A Hero nails social media fallout

The film by Asghar Farhadi is a rare example of capturing how social media influences our postures offline, while barely engaging with the internet itself

Sahar Goldoust and Amir Jadidi in A Hero. Photograph: AP. Courtesy The Guardian. 

by Adrian Horton, The Guardian

A Hero, a tense, mazy drama from the Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi, centers on a figure familiar to anyone who’s attuned to the ebbs and flows of internet celebrity: the social media Main Character, the subject of an internet backlash. Rahim (Amir Jadidi, endearing yet inscrutable), is a man imprisoned for debts in the city of Shiraz, who becomes a local hero for an act of charity of ambiguous motivation. His girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldoust), found 17 gold coins who she says were left in a purse at a bus stop, but instead of paying toward his freedom, Rahim contacts a bank and arranges a return to their owner. Within days, on furlough from jail, he’s the feelgood story of the moment.

I’ve written before about how there are few films which successfully capture the internet and/or social media without tipping into flat moralism, obsolescence or laughable facsimiles. (Social media and the internet are of course not the same thing, though in today’s climate of platform consolidation, to refer to one is basically to refer to the other, especially in the context of film and television.) This is partly because text phrasing, online references and digital interfaces change so quickly – at a much faster pace than the production of a film, let alone its distribution – that including it in text messages or social media references can jarringly distract from the story at hand; timestamped phone and computer screen risk locking the story into a tight, hyper-specific timeline that can constrain narrative, filming location or cultural references.