Time: 5:30pm-7:00pm.

Location: In-person (SOAS).

'The cover of an issue of the Tehran magazine Nadastan, from 2023, featured the rear view of a woman’s full head of curly, dark hair, an image taken by the magazine’s photography editor Mehri Rahminzadeh, who once put pregnancy tests on the magazine’s cover.

Photography is essentially a documentary artform. Yet depictions of real life, or more recently political dissent, are considered dangerous in Iran. The 2009 Green Movement forced Magnum’s Newsha Tavakolian off the streets into the artist’s studio. How do Iranian women photographers do their work; is there a metaphorical visual language on which they rely; and how art and studio photography now disseminate hard ideas that bother the regime?

A world-weary woman wearing a hijab and red boxing gloves stares out from the cover of Breathing Space: Iranian Women Photographers. The boxer is from Tavakolian’s series, Listen, 2010. It is among work by 23 photographers across three generations compiled by Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, the curator of Tehran’s first photography gallery, the Silk Road, and published last year by Thames and Hudson.

In an illustrated lecture, Malu Halasa will be presenting and discussing the work of prominent Iranian woman photographers. She will be joined by Sahar Saki, an award-winning international artist and designer, and online by Vali Mahlouji, art historian of the subaltern and founder of the non-profit platform Archaeology of the Final Decade.'

https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/event/iranian-women-photographers-now