This painting by Arghavan Khosravi depicts a contemporary woman who is only partially visible within the echoes of the architecture of ancient Persia. From one side, the woman is tethered to an iron ball from a set of shackles. From the other side, she is tethered to puppet strings that disappear into a black pool of oil, the shape of which reflects a traditional Persian decorative motif. In the foreground is a leafy garden—a symbolic reference to an idealized place.

“In literature and religion, heaven is often portrayed as a garden,” Khosravi says. “When I use plants or gardens in my work, I am thinking of the opposite of dark spaces. This woman is allowed to touch these plants, but she’s still confined by the red fence.”

Rife with symbolism, the image emanates the profound feelings of struggle and entrapment that Khosravi has experienced as a woman living under theocratic rule in post-revolutionary Iran. The woman in the painting is surrounded by beauty and elegance, and yet she is imprisoned by elements of the past and the present.

The image is based on a historic Persian miniature painting. Khosravi borrows, and then subverts, the quintessential flattened images that defined that aesthetic tradition. Expanding the image into three-dimensional space and then adding in a variety of depths and scales, she reinterprets an ancient aesthetic language known for its diminishment of women, creating a new aesthetic vehicle that can inspire contemporary cultural transformation.