This painting by Arghavan Khosravi portrays a woman whose lips are sewn shut. The thread going through her lips is also attached to the surrounding architecture, and to an iron ball. The threads continue through the composition, forming bars in a window, which turn an idyllic garden into a prison.

This painting belongs to a series of works that Khosravi made for The Witness, her 2022 solo exhibition at Kavi Gupta. Each work in the exhibition is based on a historic Persian miniature painting. Khosravi reinterpreted the aesthetic language of the original paintings to create new works that could spark conversations about contemporary cultural transformation. Among her key strategies is the subversion of the flatness that defines ancient Persian miniatures. Khosravi’s paintings are three-dimensional, featuring multiple planes, multiple scales, and multiple perspectives.

In the original painting on which this work is based, the circular space where the iron ball now rests was intended to be a reflecting pool. Here, its absence, the negative space between the two panels, becomes a shackle latching the woman in the painting to her physical environment.

Typically, the only women portrayed in Persian miniature paintings have a subservient or secondary role, lacking agency and social significance. The value system transmitted by that ancient iconography continues to shape gender politics today in post-revolutionary Iran. Having lived her whole life under Iran’s theocratic autocracy, Khosravi is looking at how values are transmitted and fostered through visual art. Khosravi’s paintings literally broaden the narrative, expanding the conversation into multi-dimensional spaces that welcome new points of view.