Tehran-based Dastan Gallery carries the flag for Iranian women artists at Frieze, with a timely selection of works by five figures established in the wake of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests across Iran and around the world. . The artists featured are Behjat Sadr (1924-2009) and Farideh Lashai (1944-2013), as well as Farah Ossouli, Bita Fayyazi and Newsha Tavakolian; prices range from around $15,000 to $200,000.
Tavakolian’s six-screen video installation Listen (2010) highlights the restrictions imposed on female singers in Iran. “For me, a woman’s voice represents a power that, if you silence it, unbalances society and distorts everything,” says Tavakolian. “I let Iranian singers perform through my camera when the world never heard them.”
Gouache by Ossouli on cardboard, David and me (2014), identifies women as agents of change in patriarchal societies. The work resembles that of the French painter Jacques-Louis David The intervention of the Sabines (1799), which shows the women intervening to stop a battle between the Romans who had kidnapped and married the women, and the Sabine men bent on getting them back.
This piece by David may be linked to the situation in Iran after the rise of the green civil rights movement in 2009, says Ossouli. “We have witnessed the efforts of women as mediators to bring peace to pre-revolution and post-revolution Iran,” she said. The arts journal.
Turmoil was unleashed in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini last September. Amini died in an Iranian hospital after being detained by the regime’s vice police for failing to follow the country’s hijab regulations. His death has sparked ongoing mass protests in cities across Iran as well as demonstrations across the world.
“There was a will in these [five] artists to speak out against the limitations of a patriarchal society and complex power apparatus whose exercise of social control relies on women’s bodies,” Dastan said in a statement. “Their practice is a seamless weaving of personal history and politics, lived through bone and blood, to arrive at their unique language.”
Sadr is represented in the show by the painting Untitled (2009), where the “layer of oil is thin enough for the white underside to shine through, but heavy [enough] to bring it down,” the gallery’s statement added.
Fayyazi wire and ceramic piece celestial creatures (2022-23) shows an undocked plant that appears to grow organically, while Lashei’s Untitled Trees series (2008) completes the selection. The late Italian critic Germano Celant wrote in 2015 that Lashei is “a woman who lived through and suffered troubled times in Iran, reflecting them in her works, from painting to poetry.”
Curator and independent consultant Dina Nasser-Khadivi, who founded the collective behind the #PostItForwardWLF campaign, says: “Dastan has adapted its program very intelligently to the situation. [in Iran] and its evolution. Over the years, they have been a great platform for key voices as well as emerging artists in Iran. What they show in New York is very relevant.
