Dismembered

As an Iranian woman I have at times found myself at odds with the limits of representation inherent in fixed images. One moment captured beautifully can come to reduce a whole population to one objectifying or essentializing representation. Yes, the artful lens and the flawless print can be oppressive. I feel the oppression of the exoticized and essentialist images as they create expectations of who I and other Iranian women supposedly are.

Working with mixed-media, I am making images concerning the nuanced identities of women in contemporary Iran. I seek to disrupt binaries prevalent in photography of non-western subjects: traditional/modern, East/West, veiled/unveiled, free/oppressed and so on. In these works, I use an approach at the intersection of photography, collage, and glass that breaks fixed images to display the nuances inherent within an Iranian woman’s cosmopolitan reality.

The themes of judgment and of a coercive gaze manifest in the work through the symbols of the eyes and the lens. I explore such leering judgments as oppressive tools used to force women into different molds: for instance Western imperial gazes can reduce women to victims, domestic authoritarian gazes can reduce them to moral threats, and patriarchal stares may reduce them to objects of desire.

While such oppressive peering is invisible, it is a force that fills empty space and is felt on women’s bodies. Glass frames such empty spaces giving it materiality, while simultaneously depicting women’s bodies as dismembered by such gazes and reduced to symbols that render their reality almost invisible.

• 2022 MFA THESIS EXHIBITION