Arghavan Khosravi Iranian, b. 1984

This painting by Arghavan Khosravi depicts a contemporary woman whose arm is bound by wires. The wires are also connected to a missile, and to a flattened painting of pomegranates and white doves. The woman’s face is covered by a flattened image of a face on the cover of a book. Below the rocket, feeding into it, is a pool of black liquid running through a series of pipes.

This image is based on a historic Persian miniature painting. Khosravi has deconstructed and then reimagined the elements of the painting to make a critical statement juxtaposing the role of contemporary Iranian women under post-revolutionary theocratic rule with diminished and subservient portrayals of women in Persian art history.

The image of pomegranates and doves literally ties the contemporary woman to the artistic traditions of the past. A garden full of fruit and birds is an idealized portrait of a heavenly place, but here the garden is shackled and bound to a missile. The black liquid beneath the missile can be understood as a symbolic reference to oil, feeding a totalitarian regime that is itself intricately tied to a culture influenced by hyper-magnified gender roles.

Among the most illustrative elements of Khosravi’s work is her practice of subverting the flat perspective that is associated with Persian miniature painting. Khosravi undermines that effect by building multi-planar structures that support multiple images portrayed in multiple scales at multiple depths. By expanding her paintings into three dimensions, Khosravi literally broadens the narrative surrounding post-revolutionary Iranian women within contemporary visual culture.