‘Individual and apolitical’ is how the young generation of female artists animating the Iranian art scene describe themselves. And yet much of their work is a provocative challenge to the way their culture treats women. Vida Adamoli reports. 

Over the past five years things have become more liberal in Iran. As a result the lines of conflict between artists and the conservative, religious clergy are less clear-cut than they used to be. In a country where everything from schoolrooms to ski slopes to public buses is segregated, women artists are taking more risks than ever.  The photographer, Shadi Ghadiria, is one of them. 

Ghadiria lives and work in Tehran, the city where she was born in 1974. The themes explored by her work are censorship, religion, modernity, and the status of women in the Islamic world.  Her success, both at home and abroad, is a mini-revolution in itself. Many of Iran's female artists felt obliged to emigrate in order to pursue their creativity without constraints.

Shadi Ghadirian is best known for a series of portraits entitled Like Every Day. These arresting images, made between 2000 and 2001, comment on the domestic drudgery and cruel anonymity defining so many Iranian women’s lives. Draped in tablecloths instead of the traditional chador, the faces of these female figures are replaced by household objects - an iron, a grater, a broom, a pan, and a bright yellow Marigold glove. Some of the portraits also parody universal female stereotypes, such as the ‘hatchet-faced wife’ with a meat cleaver instead of a face.  Read More