LONDON — A woman leans seductively against a table, pouting. She holds a cigarette loosely in her manicured hand and wears a striped polo shirt. Her curly dark hair is cut in a stylish Marilyn Monroe bob. This is Zinat Moadab, star of the first “talkie” made in Iran, and one of the 28 Iranian women portrayed in Soheila Sokhanvari’s series of luminous miniature portraits, currently on view in the exhibition Rebel, Rebel at the Barbican Centre.

Zinat Moadab went into self-imposed exile in the United States with her filmmaker husband in the early 1970s and continued to work in the theater. She was one of the lucky ones. Other cultural figures in the portraits were victims of a society that oppressed women both before and after the 1979 Revolution. Under the Shah’s pro-Western autocracy they were given superficial freedoms but punished for their creativity and sexuality; under Khomeini’s Islamist theocracy, they were forced to renounce any public role or risk arrest. Many died tragic and premature deaths.

Born in Shiraz, Sokhanvari herself fled Iran as a child a year before the Revolution and has devoted her artistic practice to the country she left behind. Her works in Rebel, Rebel bring a bygone age back to vivid life. Using archival photographs as her source material, she recreates the black and white images with riotous colors and kaleidoscopic patterns. The exhibition space itself is transformed into a psychedelic vision with its pastel-green patterned walls, hologram videos housed in pink plinths, and glittery Stanley Kubrick-inspired “monolith” sculpture.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.