BURNING WINGS A video Program of Iranian Women Artists

4 This video program is dedicated to the Iranian poetess Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967).

“Do not seal my lips with the padlock of silence For I have an untold story in my heart.”

Rebellion In Côté femmes - d’un poème l’autre

In Iran, cinema and photography have given rise to numerous publications and artistic events, both abroad and in Iran. On the other hand, video has not really been the subject of specific in-depth studies, despite a few articles that have tried to give an account of the history of this medium and the way in which artists have appropriated it.

In recent years, the situation of artists has changed considerably - notably because of the conditions of production but also because of the socio-political context. The relationship to the moving image has been transformed by, among other things, the massive use of social networks, and their subversive power of political resistance in certain demonstrations held in public space.

Women artists living in Iran or in the diaspora use video to produce works that express the complexity of their relationship to the world reflecting a trend, observed in the past, of personal and intimate narratives that take on a more militant tone over time.

Women artists seek to record fragments of their thoughts, their memories, their feelings and their contradictions. They confront history, the evocation of exile, transgression, the question of relationships to power or to social and religious norms.

The works often have a committed character and are marked by a great sensitivity showing the relation between the visible and the invisible, the use of the poetic metaphor. They question the past, question the taboos, the traditions sometimes, they have a melancholic, provocative, funny, excessive aspect. They represent the body, whether it is vulnerable, hidden, deformed, transformed, censored, erased, silenced.

Fighters, they are determined to express their desire to exist, to support the silent but active protests to express their empowerment as artists.

WORKS