The public sphere in Iran is laden with restrictions implemented by the Islamic Republic: women must cover their hair outdoors; couples, unless married, cannot hold hands or be affectionate in the streets; no dance clubs; no live concerts with female performers… the list seems endless.
The current exhibition at Berkeley’s Alphonse Berber Gallery, Tehran: Public Lives Private Spaces — New Art and Digital Media from Iran is a series of photographs and video installations depicting these restrictions on public life — and the defiant private lives of young people in Iran’s capital city. Most of the work was created by Tehran-based artists born after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Mahboube Karamli’s installation The Girls is a series of photos of young Iranian women sitting on their beds. To describe this work, Karamali wrote, “I think that most of the girls, who are the same age as me, also spend a great amount of time in their bedrooms. If we add to this… the time each girl spends sleeping, one would see that a significant amount of their lives up to this point have been spent on their beds. It is safe to say that these girls are most relaxed in their bedrooms; after all it is their own private space.”
We see young Iranian women with their hair unveiled, the skin of their arms and legs defiantly bare. Each stares directly into the camera with a look that seems to say, “I have nothing to hide.” The images vary: a woman lays seductively across her bed; another sits cross-legged, smoking a cigarette (an act looked down upon for women in Iranian society); a third is surrounded by a pile of shoes. Each woman is young and beautiful, with a look of confidence in her eyes.
In a back room, Neda Razavipour’s video installation, Find the Lost One, shows a split-screen with identical video clips of people walking to and from the entrance to one of Tehran’s subway stations. Razavipour removed one of the commuters on one side of the screen; the viewer is meant to find him or her in the half of the video left intact. The installation represents the dozens who have “dissappeared” in Iran in the aftermath of 2009’s contested presidential election. Each person on the screen becomes important; any one could disappear at any moment. The sense of anxiety that arises as you try to find the one that has been erased invokes empathy for those Iranian families that must contend with the sudden disappearance of a loved one.