Iran

the Challenge of Women in Art

Abstract

Understanding feminism as the political and ideological movement that it is, we will focus on Iranian women artists who, with their praxis, contribute everyday to subvert the prevailing patriarchal principles of their country of origin (though certainly they also do it in the countries they are living in). We will deal with the work of the artists who live in exile, the ones who have stayed in Iran and those who live between their homeland and other countries far from their culture. We will observe that there is a real artistic push from women who are conscious of their unequal situation and use their activity as a tool for action and dissent. They know international languages and how to use them, though they are interested in unfolding a symbolic and iconographic system based on their cultural sources. Thus, they display a group of complex and even enigmatic visual relationships that let the public imagination run free.