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| Courtesy of the artist/Stems Gallery and CNN. |
For Iranian artist Arghavan Khosravi, depicting hair in her paintings has become charged with emotion. She posted a video on Instagram in early October that showed her sweeping a paintbrush across the canvas to create fine strands. "These days when I'm painting hair, I'm filled with anger and hope. More than ever," she wrote in the caption.
She added the hashtag #MahsaAmini to the post, the name of the 22-year-old woman who died in Iran's capital Tehran in September after being arrested by the country's morality police for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly. Amini's death has since catalyzed nationwide protests — many of which have seen young women and girls defiantly cutting their hair — and her name has become a rallying cry on social media.
Khosravi grew up in a secular Tehran household in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a new theocratic regime instated oppressive rules for women, including making the hijab, or headscarf, mandatory in public.
"At a very early age I realized that there is this contrast between your private spaces — your home — and then public spaces. At home you are free to do whatever you want," Khosravi said in a phone call from Stamford, Connecticut. "You learn to navigate this dual life."
Khosravi had her own encounter with the morality police in 2011 and was temporarily detained, she explained. Based in the US since moving in 2015 to study painting, the former graphic designer uses long, flowing hair as a symbol in her metaphor-laden works. Her surreal, dreamlike portraits of women, which appear on multi-paneled surfaces that resemble architectural facades, were influenced by the flattened perspectives and meticulous details of Persian miniature paintings.
