Forough Painting

In the portrait of Forough who, like myself is an Iranian woman living in New Orleans, I highlight some shared cultural experiences: the Persian passion for poetry, but also the Islamic veiling of women’s bodies. Forough is proud of the fact she was named after Forough Farrokhzad—a prominent Iranian feminist poet. Her poetry, which deeply influenced me as a teenager, was banned for a decade following the Islamic revolution. In this portrait, I pay homage to the poet by transcribing the entirety of her last book, by hand, directly on the canvas. The act of slowly writing it by hand, rather than quickly printing it, is meant as an act of defiance against the censorship of the Islamic regime. While most women in these portraits wear plaid, a pattern often associated with masculinity, Forough does not. Instead, her lace bra evokes the seductiveness of Farrokhzad’s poetry. Her poems were controversial, deemed improper because they reflect on Farokhzad’s own experiences of intimacy and love. Her poetry highlighted the cultural conflicts around women’s role as a subject and object of love. Yet Forough’s face is still veiled, covered like most of the women in this series: an ever-present reference to the control imposed over women’s bodies. That idea is reinforced by the measurement line seen in all of the portraits. The scale bar is ubiquitous in my art, as if my signature, but also a subtle yet nagging reminder of how women are judged by the proportions of their bodies. These women, however, cannot be reduced to bodily proportions. The length of the ruler in each portrait is the life-size measurement of their heads, pointing instead to the value of their intellect.