In Iran, many artists and intellectuals have embraced the September 2022 protest movement, which arose following the death of young Mahsa Amini three days after being detained by the morality police. This wave of protest has significantly changed Iranian society.
Cinema, literature, drawing, music… All means of expression are being mobilized to support the popular movement, despite the numerous and significant risks.
Poster created for Femme Vie Liberté
“At the end of all this rain of blood, there will be a rainbow.”
Tirdad Hashemi gave this title to one of his drawings created in late 2022, in the wake of the Iranian uprising. In a short sentence, he expresses the distress and hopes of the youth of his home country, which the artist left to be able to live his homosexuality peacefully.
Suffocation (2021) by Pegah Samaie (Iranian/American, b. 1980), oil on aluminum panel, (45.7 × 45.7 cm)
Private collection.
Pegah Samaie is an Iranian-American artist who was born and raised in Tehran, Iran.
Pegah’s art traverses the shadow of her past life. She uses art as a tool to cope with the experiences she and other women had in a culture dominated by patriarchal governments and households.
Her early experiences in Iran changed her perception of the role of women in society; they motivated her and influenced the way she talks about women.
Art is her voice to express her feelings and experiences.
Pegah studied drawing and painting under master Iranian artists. She received her BFA with honors from the prestigious Laguna College of Art and Design in Laguna Beach, California, where she is also completing her MFA.
Samaneh Atef left Iran with her husband two years ago to settle in France. This Iranian artist denounces the lack of fundamental rights for women in her country. She dreams of one day seeing her compatriots free and happy.
From France, Samaneh Atef “dreams of one day seeing her compatriots free and happy.” She is currently designing a dress that she will wear the day she returns to her free country.
“When I left Iran, I had no hope that the country would change. Today, my Iranian friends and I are full of hope. We Iranians believe in freedom and life.”
Samaneh Atef would have happily stayed in her country, Iran. But the wear and tear of a straitjacketed life coupled with a hopeless future took its toll: the artist finally left. Out of despair, she went into exile in France, where she has lived for two years. “Nowhere in Iran have I ever been able to exhibit my work, in any gallery. Impossible,” she laments.
“The Fragility of Peace” 2019, by Arghavan Khosravi. Acrylic and photo transfer on a found wood block; printed fabric and cotton canvas mounted on wood panel, (101 x 145 cm).
“Black Rain” 2021, by Arghavan Khosravi. Acrylic and cement on cotton canvas wrapped with a shaped wood panel, wood cutout, bungee cord, (232.7 x 267.3 x 27.9 cm).
Khosravi was born in 1984 in Shahr-e-Kord, Iran, and moved to the United States in 2015. She quickly rose to prominence in the American art scene with her multifaceted, rich, and dazzling works, which create a subtle bridge between the European Renaissance and the traditions of Persian miniature painting.
“Stand with Iranian Revolution”, 2022, Sara Chelou, acrylic painting, 50 x 50 cm
Writing Ourselves, (2020), Kimia Fatehi.
“Land of Dreams” is a political satire set in the near future, where America has closed its borders and become more isolated than ever. The story follows Simin, an Iranian-American woman, in search of the very essence of American freedom. She works for the Census Bureau, the most important government agency of her time.
In an effort to understand and control its population, the government launched a program to record citizens’ dreams. Simin, one of the Census Bureau’s chief dreamcatchers, is unaware of this nefarious plot. As one of the last immigrants admitted to the country, she is torn between her appreciation of American acceptance, her compassion for those whose dreams she records, and an inner truth she must find.
Playful and poignant, Land of Dreams acknowledges the grandeur of the American experiment while offering a warning of what might come.
“A way of questioning the passage of time, loss and exile, the past fading away, leaving only light: an ultimate quest towards the timeless and eternal state of Being.”
Malekeh Nayiny is one of the most well-known and acclaimed Iranian female photographers. Her work occupies an important place in the Iranian art scene. Born in 1955 in Tehran, she studied photography in the United States, then moved to Paris, where she lives and works today.
Scene from a popular film, 2009, digital print, 115 x76cm
White Light, 2013, photo retouched with various filters, 29 x 99 cm
Maryam Firuzi
While the photography enthusiast “didn’t want to group the series with a title at all,” she notes recurring themes. “We could have made chapters; we had enough material, but that would have created gaps. […] We talk about the war four or five times, but the images aren’t side by side; they’re from different points in the book. Some women in the book clearly talk about feminism, but we didn’t try to place them side by side,” she notes. Thus, the artists’ words aren’t confined or limited by labels.
In 2004, the series “West by East” caricatured the censorship of the Iranian authorities who covered images of women in foreign magazines with ink (Shadi Ghadirian courtesy Silk Road Gallery).
“Qajar” 1998, Shadi Ghadirian
Hidden, fictional captives, veiled, or revealing themselves as icons on a computer desktop, the female figure dominates Shadi Ghadirian’s work. Her work is intimately linked to her identity as a Muslim woman living in Iran in 2015. She questions the role of women in society, exploring censorship, religion, and modernity in Iran, but her art also addresses issues concerning women living in other parts of the world.
The series “Like Every Day” highly acclaimed and controversial when it was released in 2000, features portraits of fully veiled women, their faces hidden behind kitchen utensils. It is both terrifying and laughable.
Film by Abbas Kiarostami (Iran) 1 hour 23 minutes, (French release: March 21, 1990), drama,
Summary
As he prepares to do his homework, a schoolboy realizes that he has mistakenly taken home a classmate’s notebook. Knowing that his classmate risks being expelled if he doesn’t hand in his own notebook, he sets out to find him. But the road is long and difficult, the address unclear, and time is running out until the next day when the homework is due.
Film by Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), 1 hour 38 minutes, released in France: October 30, 1991), drama
Summary
An obsessive and unemployed film buff, Hossein Sabzian cannot resist the temptation to impersonate filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf in order to curry favor with a bourgeois Iranian family. Once unmasked, the man is dragged before the courts for fraud. Upon learning of this incident, director Abbas Kiarostami quickly assembles a film crew to reconstruct the events and film Sabzian’s trial.
Three days after posting a concert on YouTube in which she appeared without a headscarf, Iranian singer Parastoo Ahmadi was arrested.
In a bold act of defiance, Parastou Harmadi, a young Iranian singer, chose to make her voice heard in a country where women are not allowed to sing alone in public. Her clandestine concert, filmed in a secret location in Iran, was posted on YouTube—a platform blocked in the country. This courageous gesture quickly gained international attention, accumulating over 1.7 million views in just four days.
The Women of My Country
My country is a legendary land.
It is the land of wind, sand, and sun.
It is the region of Sistan and Baluchistan.
The women of my land are beautiful, kind.
Intelligent and sensitive, they are stable and strong.
They set the feelings of girls and women ablaze.
They stifled the warm voices of the mothers of my land.
They extinguished the love in the hearts of women.
Hajar (Hura) Mirshekari (born in Iran in 1985) is a singer, visual artist, and performer.
Now a painter in France, she seeks new inspiration for her art in exile.
In support of the current movement, Hura Mirshekari reposted the video of this 2019 performance on Instagram a few weeks ago. The accompanying text, written by her husband, sculptor Mehdi Yarmohammadi, evokes the imprisonment of women in Iranian society, including by the hijab.
“Variations on the Female Body” by Hura Mirshekari at the Atelier des artistes en exil, in Paris. ©Hura Mirshekari (huramishekari.fr) and Stéphanie Boillon/CCAS
“Rahim” (2013) from the series “Our House Is on Fire” by renowned Iranian-American photographer and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.
Shirin Neshat was born in Iran and left the country at 17 to study art in the United States, graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, with an MFA in 1982.
Upon returning to Iran in 1990, she found the country she had known before the 1979 Revolution, which would inspire the meditations on memory, loss, and contemporary life in Iran that are so central to her work, barely recognizable.
Her series “Our House Is on Fire” was a response to a commission to create a body of work in response to social issues. It was inspired by her time in Egypt in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution and explores its aftermath, giving voice to the grief that still consumed the city nearly three years later.
Like many of Neshat‘s works, this series consists of portraits and details of hands and feet, capturing emotions both individual and universal, drawing on personal narrative and the collective human experience.
Emotional and personal, the work speaks to loss as an inescapable element of the human condition. “When a revolution begins, there is something euphoric and contagious,” the artist explains. “No one thinks about the human cost, and that’s the story I wanted to share, the grief that connects the victims and the victors.”
Neshat painted a stream of words from Iranian revolutionary poets such as Mehdi Akhavan Sales through the folds and wrinkles of her subjects’ skin. The writing is so meticulously inscribed that it seems to flow from their pores, as if forcing the hidden and unspoken to the surface.
Shirin Neshat’s “Women of Allah” series.
Upon her return to Iran in 1990, Shirin Neshat was particularly impressed by the effects of the Islamic Revolution on the status of women. This experience marked a pivotal turning point in her practice, which, using a poetic vocabulary inspired in particular by Persian culture, questions the notions of identity, refuge, and utopia.
The “Women of Allah” series (1993-1997) is a major collection of close-up portraits of women. Of these veiled, armed, and tattooed women, we only see parts of their faces, hands, and feet, left uncovered by the veil, but which are in turn covered by poems in Persian (Farsi) calligraphy.
The chadors combined with weapons, the power of these women’s gaze, which evokes their status as martyrs, and the bodies marked by poems, highlight the complexity of identities and the need to overcome stereotypes.
The texts, taken from books by Iranian writers, interact with the image to make its meaning more complex; prose and poetry are often integrated, and the content varies from religious to more secular subjects, to the exploration of the spheres of intimacy and sexuality.
“Women of Allah” series by Shirin Neshat.
“Women of Allah” is a series through which Shirin Neshat investigates the complexity of the feminine dimension in Iran after the Islamic Revolution.
In stark black and white, which would become a hallmark of her photographic research, Neshat depicts veiled Iranian women, often brandishing firearms.
The texts, taken from books by Iranian writers, interact with the image to enhance its meaning; prose and poetry are often integrated, and the content ranges from religious to more secular subjects, even exploring the spheres of intimacy and sexuality.
Below, the woman depicted in the work exhibited at the Madre is the artist herself, and the lines, traced across her face to form a spiral, are taken from a poem by the poet Forugh Farrokhzad, active in the years preceding the Islamic Revolution. As in many other images in this series, the focal points here are the gaze and the veil, interpreted respectively as symbols of individuality and religious culture.
“Women of Allah” series by Shirin Neshat.
Persepolis is a French animated feature film directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi (a French-Iranian artist), released in France on June 27, 2007. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007.
… Crossing with her revolution, war, mourning, exile, but also learning about life, puberty, first loves, we will follow her until her final departure for France in 1994. Originally published between 2000 and 2004 in 4 volumes, Persepolis is the first Iranian comic strip, the illustrated autobiography of an oriental woman in exile.
“Atomic woman II” by Marjane Strapi.
She has the intense, rebellious dark gaze of the girls in her paintings: “I like honest women, fierce women,” confides Marjane Satrapi, a comic book creator and director who is preparing to exhibit her paintings in Paris.
An artist dyes fountains blood red to illustrate repression.
The film “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Eran Riklis, released in France on March 26, 2025, starring Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani.
Adapted from the autobiographical book of the same name by Azar Nafisi, published in France by Plon in 2004, the new film by Israeli director Eran Riklis tells the story of this Iranian literature professor who attempts to resist the power of the Islamic regime from within.
Chronicles of Tehran, a film by Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami
Ordinary scenes from life in Tehran, where the absurd vies with the odious. These “chronicles,” shot in a rush over the course of a week by Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami, bear witness to an Iranian society muzzled by a totalitarian regime where, under the influence of religion, individual freedom is gradually being reduced to nothing. Through nine situations captured on film, each showing a citizen grappling with a representative of authority—administration, police, employer—an entire system is laid bare in its obsession with control, its dread of Western hegemony… These scenes, whose derisive treatment does not mask their cruelty.
If the precariousness of the female condition and the obligation of the veil are recurring motifs – the film bears the imprint of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement and offers the poignant image of this little girl discovering herself, in the mirror, engulfed in the clothes imposed by the school – we also see that men are not spared, like the one who, having come to collect a driving license, finds himself forced to undress…
Sahar Delijani, writer:
Tehran, 1983. Neda was born in Evin Prison. She was taken from her mother a few weeks later. When he was three years old, Omid witnessed the arrest of his dissident parents. Like other children of political prisoners, Neda and Omid were raised by their relatives, in the shade of the jacaranda trees, the flamboyant purple trees that would grace their childhood. Twenty years later, their generation still carries the weight of the past, at a time when a new wave of protests and political struggles is beginning…
Shahriar Mandanipour
“I’m going to tell you the love story of Sara and Dara. How can one love in Iran, when any encounter between the sexes is forbidden? An encounter forbidden to experience as well as to write… This is also my story as a writer, a love story with words, fraught with pitfalls. Because in my country, when it comes to love, censorship is always on the watch… Together, we will outwit it!”
Shahriar Mandanipour was born in 1957 in Iran. Banned from publication in his country between 1992 and 1997, he currently lives in the United States. “Censoring an Iranian Romance Novel” is his first novel translated into French.
“The Old Woman in a Burqa” (2021), by Arefeh Avazzadeh.
Arash Hanaei (born 1978), Capital Series, 2009, print on coated paper, collection of the artist.
Film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Iranian),
drama, 1 hour 15 minutes, released April 9, 1997 (France)
Summary:
A film about a score settling between a director and a police officer in which they each decide to stage a scene recalling an incident they experienced twenty years earlier, which earned the director several years in prison.
Film by Mohammad Rasoulof (Iranian),
drama, 2 hours 46 minutes, released September 18, 2024 (France), winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes 2004, nominated for a César Award and an Oscar.
Plot:
Iman has just been promoted to investigating judge at the Revolutionary Court of Tehran when a massive popular protest movement begins to shake the country.
Overwhelmed by the scale of the events, he confronts the absurdity of the system and its injustices but decides to conform to it.
At home, his two daughters, Rezvan and Sana, both students, fiercely support the movement, while his wife, Najmeh, tries to balance both sides.
Paranoia ensues when Iman’s service weapon mysteriously disappears.
“Mohayeh Zibat” (2020) by Sahar Ghorishi.
Woman! Life! Freedom!
This book reflects the echoes of a revolutionary uprising in Iran, by Chowra Makaremi (published by La Découverte).
Since September 2022, women and men, often young, have been engaged in a work of political conquest and the opening of possibilities in Iran that moves us in a certain way.
“I’m Deranged,” a show by Iranian artist Mina Kavani, a cross between Iran and David Lynch.
Born in Tehran and living in exile in Paris, she introduces herself: “My name is Mina Kavani, I’m an actress.”
Currently, she is performing her magnificent show, I’m Deranged, at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet in Paris, a fascinating, political, and poetic reflection of herself.
A creation in which she writes the text, directs, and performs.
Arghavan Khosravi (Iran, United States).
Born and raised in Iran, Arghavan Khosravi came to the United States in 2015 to pursue an MFA in painting at RISD.
Blending aspects of surrealism and Persian miniature, Khosravi creates evocative works that interrogate notions of freedom, agency, and identity.
At the heart of these questions is the role of women in Iranian and American societies.
In Iran, Khosravi lived what she calls a “double life”: a public existence in accordance with Islamic laws and a more liberated private life.
Raised in a secular family during the first decade following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Khosravi experienced the “domination of the oppressive regime” on a daily basis, notably when she was arrested while walking down the street in Tehran because her hijab did not adequately cover her body.
While the United States offered her new freedoms, she found herself, as an immigrant, directly affected by the 2017 U.S. entry ban.
In 2019, the Newport Art Museum presented Khosravi‘s work in “The Shapes of Birds: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa,” her first museum exhibition after graduating from RISD.
Through powerful imagery and symbolism, Khosravi’s evocative works inspire audiences to reflect on the role and rights of people, particularly women, in the United States and beyond.
Iranian artist Mariam Tafsiri uses her art to address feminist struggles in a context of repression.
Her works explore female identity and resistance to social norms imposed by a patriarchal society.
She often depicts the female body as a space of reclamation and freedom, challenging stereotypes and traditional roles.
Through symbols and metaphors, Tasfiri gives voice to often invisible Iranian women, while echoing feminist struggles worldwide.
Her work is a magnificent act of resistance, demonstrating how art can become a powerful tool for social change and women’s empowerment.
Iranian artists have been among the hardest hit by the repression. From Tehran (where they resist) or elsewhere (where they support), they deliver the testimonies of fighters whose weapons are words, drawings, songs…