Representation of Women in Iranian Art

Aida Foroutan
Artist and PhD candidate University of Manchester England

I approach the subject of the representation of women in Iranian art both as a

working artist and as an academic art historian presently engaged in writing a
PhD thesis. As a working artist I have already a large body of work, some of
which speaks directly to the question of how the life of women is observed and
expressed in Iran. One of the main components of this part of my work is a
series of 31 paintings Zendegi-ye Zanān 'Women's Life', which portrays aspects
of the struggle for women's rights in Iran. This series is painted in a Surrealist
style, in oils, on canvas. My main inspiration for this series of works was the
struggle of Iranian women to achieve their social and national freedom
through their human rights as women being incorporated into the Iranian
National Constitution. My work was to reflect this process and was based on a
longstanding research project on the social aspects of women's lives. The
research was carried out by looking at Iranian women from different angles
and at different stages of their lives, provided by personal stories and
observations of commonly understood experiences. Each of the paintings was
an element in the drama of the life of women in Iran, from birth and giving
birth, to bereavement and death. I also tried to look at women's lives outside
Iran, and to find commonalities with what women experience all around the
world. This I try to achieve through a visual language of signs and symbols
that is internationally recognised as denoting feminine meanings.

As part of this work, I came to reflect on the possibilities and limits of the
surrealist genre of art and literature as a medium of expression of social and
cultural issues. This strong interest has led me in the past two years towards a
major academic project to discover the roots and relevance of Surrealism in
Iran. I am working with one of the world's foremost experts on Western
Surrealism, Professor David Lomas, in the University of Manchester, with the
long-term intention of finding out not just how surrealist styles and
techniques are used in Iran in modernity and post-modernity, and their
importance, but also, and crucially for the history of Surrealism, how for
centuries a 'proto-Surrealist' style and technique has been present in
Persian/Iranian art and literature. This proto-Surrealism has acted, as
Surrealist art continues to do in contemporary Iranian culture, as a subversive
channel of expression and comment in a society where censorship and
suppression of the artist and writer have always been present.
 19- Search
70x90cm

Click here to view 'Women's Life'