This painting by Arghavan Khosravi portrays three women entrapped and threatened by an assortment of torture devices, including a bomb, an iron ball from a set of shackles, a missile, and a box of rocks. Though all three women are essentially caged to various degrees, they are also all three visible, as if on display for the viewer’s theatrical amusement. Their anxiety and confusion is like a carnival attraction. The seated woman’s hand is resting inside a cone within a cube—a metaphoric gesture intended to balance the threat hanging over her.

“The imagery creates a feeling or a mood of lightness and transparency,” Khosravi says. “I wanted something the opposite of the rocks above her head. It looks like glass, so it’s fragile, but the rocks are something that puts that fragility in danger.”

Elements such as the missile and the clothes the women are wearing place the image in contemporary times, but the composition is actually based on an ancient Persian miniature painting. The struggle for gender equality in post-revolutionary Iran has deeply affected Khosravi’s life and work. Cultural depictions of women as subservient and inferior are common in Persian miniature paintings. Another defining characteristic of Persian miniature paintings is their flatness—every element is portrayed at the same size and scale, with no sense of depth or perspective. Understanding that, figuratively, flattened depictions of gender roles are a key part of the problem, Khosravi subverts the visual flatness, expanding her paintings into three-dimensional space. However, although they are portrayed in a multi-dimensional world now, the contemporary women in Khosravi’s paintings are nonetheless trapped within a hyper-violent, militaristic space, hidden away, objectified, and bound together with their environment and their history.