On the first day of spring, which is also the day of the New Year in Iran, Parvaneh E’temadi passed away. She is regarded as the most significant female painter in the history of Iran. Female painter. She did not like this epithet. If someone referred to her as a “female painter,” she would respond sternly that gender had no place in such a descriptor: “Why don’t you say a good painter? Why do you say a female painter?” E’temadi believed that men and women had a “different psychology of artistic creation.” Still, beyond that, she felt that “an artist sheds their skin at the door of the studio and enters with their soul. The soul has no gender.”
Nevertheless, the phrase “the most significant female painter in the history of Iran” was frequently used to describe her, as were words like “the most expensive female artist in Iran.” At the very least, the market never managed to separate her works from her identity as a woman. And her gender was also denoted in the coverage of her death. She was not eulogized as a “modernist artist” who tried to bring abstract and figurative boundaries closer together. No, she was once again described as “the most significant female painter in Iran.”
Her death also occasioned plans for an exhibition in tribute to Iranian women artists; “Reported by Women,” a show showcasing the history of women’s contribution to Iranian visual arts at “The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.” The idea had remarkable potential for organizing a unique and even radical event. The restless women’s rights movement in Iran, especially in the years following the death of Mahsa Amini — a 22-year-old girl who was arrested in Tehran because of the clothes she was wearing and was sent from the police detention center to the hospital with brain death hours later catalyzing months of street protests in Iran — has been able to gain public empathy and support for women’s issues more than ever before. The event could have been a space to give voice to this movement, to rally its members, and give them a history and a coherent, centralized identity.
One year after an election that shifted power in Iran from those who supported compulsory dress policies to an administration that has not issued a new law restricting women’s dress, three years after Mahsa’s death and the protests known as “Woman, Life, Freedom,” and after the highly successful “Picasso in Tehran” exhibition held last spring at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the announcement of the summer exhibition “Reported by Women” by the state-run Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, which operates under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, stoked great excitement. The show’s opening was delayed by the twelve-day war between Israel and Iran, and the delay heightened the public’s anticipation.
They were disappointed.
The curators of this exhibition had planned to display works by female artists from within the museum’s permanent collection. Eight of the museum’s nine galleries were dedicated to these pieces, and it was reported that more than half of the 121 works displayed on the walls were being exhibited for the first time. Many critics, after visiting the exhibition, not only questioned the arrangement, order, and selected works, but even wondered aloud how some of the paintings had ended up in the collection in the first place.
The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art stocked its holdings during two distinct periods. The first occurred at its founding in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during which time the majority of the museum’s modern art masterpieces were acquired. The second was in the mid-2000s, during the reformist era, when the museum had both funding and competent art directors. In addition, some artists and collectors have donated their collections to the museum in recent years. Nevertheless, less than ten percent of the total collection consists of works by female artists. Some of the artists featured in this exhibition are completely unknown, and some of their works are entirely out of sync with the rest of the valuable masterpieces in the collection.
Of course, valuable works were also displayed in the exhibition — pieces by Parvaneh E’temadi, Monir Farmanfarmaian, and Lili Amir-Arjomand, alongside early works by artists such as Shirin Neshat, and two reverse glass paintings by “Zohreh Kazemi,” the legal name of “Zahra Rahnavard,” wife of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and one of the leaders of the social protests against the results of the election held in Iran in 2009. She has spent more than fifteen years under house arrest. Still, despite the exceptional outliers, the criticisms were overwhelming.
Critics and ordinary visitors alike asked the exhibition’s curators, “Why has contemporary art, radical women’s art, their protest art, and their responses to current events in Iranian society found no place in this exhibition?” The curators explained that the museum intended to create an exhibition from what already existed in the collection, and the only works in the collection that could be considered “revolutionary art” were a minimal number of paintings by leftist artists in support of the masses, which date from the Iranian Revolutionary period, nothing more. In the years following the revolution, the Museum of Contemporary Art has always faced the threat of selling artworks that, due to “society’s moral values,” are deemed unsuitable for public display. Among these is Francis Bacon’s triptych self-portrait — over the years, rumors about its imminent sale have resurfaced repeatedly. The museum has been pressured to maintain a very conservative purchasing policy and to display artworks that won’t inspire the regime’s displeasure.
In the museum’s defense, some critics have argued that artists themselves have refrained from creating works that cannot be publicly displayed, and as one of the curators of this exhibition told me, “there was nothing for the museum to censor or remove.” This claim is baseless. Parvaneh E’temadi, in whose honor the exhibition was reportedly held, owns a considerable number of figurative works, showing that even the Islamic Revolution and the rise of strict interpretations of Islam that severely restricted the display of women’s bodies did not stop the creation of such pieces. The recent judicial ruling ordering the “destruction of artworks” by an Iranian painter and illustrator guilty of “promoting immorality,” which was handed down in Tehran, also shows that works inconsistent with the public moral standards desired by the authorities in Iran are still being produced — why would the court outlaw something that doesn’t exist? — but even posting images of them on personal social media accounts provokes reactions. It is conceivable that artists self-censor or prefer not to display controversial works, and that the museum exercises similar caution in curation.
Severe censorship policies governing public, state-sponsored art spaces have been a feature of Iranian society for decades. Some point out that the mere survival and activity of these spaces, already few and far between, can help break boundaries in other areas, and so the curators should not risk their own institutions by flouting censorship codes. The recent exhibition was no exception. The museum’s curators say that although the exhibition was limited to “collection works,” which represent not only a specific historical period but also a particular taste, they tried to make “Reported by Women” into an essential event in another way: by inviting partner galleries to display works by “contemporary” female artists.
More than eighty percent of art graduates in Iran are women. However, the record-breaking artworks and the majority of pieces presented at events like the Tehran Auction and other prestigious auctions are the work of male artists. Although the population of female artists is larger than that of male artists, their market share is significantly lower than that of men. The curators of “Reported by Women” say that to give that segment of female artists a chance to participate in this event, thirteen private galleries were invited to showcase contemporary women’s art and complete the museum’s narrative of women’s art. The issue is that of the roughly twenty major galleries in Tehran that dominate the display and sale of trend-setting contemporary art, none of which were included in the list of galleries that joined this event. Instead, some state-run galleries, including those of the “House of Artists,” and a few private galleries — some of which have regularly hosted exhibitions curated by the same curators of “Reported by Women” in recent years — joined the event.
The curators attribute the lack of participation from major galleries to insufficient time and haste in publishing the call for involvement. The galleries claim that no one invited them to participate in the event, and the calls were neither public nor transparent – it was not clear why the galleries tat . One reason for this confusion is that even in galleries outside the state-run space that joined the event, censorship was manifest. One collector who had offered several works for display at the House of Artists said: “I submitted a collection of works by female artists I owned for the ‘Reported by Women’ event, but some of them, which included nude figures, were returned to me and not displayed.” It seems that ultimately, even in galleries, what could have been judged as “radical art” was removed by the curators and replaced with other works.
The exhibition’s art director (hilariously, a man in his fifties) contradicts the obvious: “The issue was not censorship but the lower artistic value of the rejected works. Even among the pieces displayed in galleries as radical art, some haven’t gone beyond mere craftsmanship, while art should contain something shocking — not just expression.”
And there is another, related criticism being leveraged against the exhibition and its curators: the museum does not usually sell artworks, but in this case, it has partnered with galleries that have capitalized on this prestigious association by driving up prices for artworks that ordinarily would have sold for far less than the current price tag. This is reminiscent of a disturbing trend that flourished during and after the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests. Publishers, shops, and art galleries busied themselves with manufacturing and selling protest paraphernalia. Illustrated books, necklaces, and earrings with protest slogans proliferated. Even images of those killed in the demonstrations were printed on T-shirts and hoodies sold in “artistic” markets, as if Che Guevara had died again! Critics like Hadi Moemnie, a painter and art teacher in Tehran, told me in an interview that what took place under the banner of Reported by Women in private galleries was ‘a market-driven effort that objectifies women, rather than serving art and creating space for female artists’. A claim that has been echoed repeatedly about this exhibition across social media: Parvaneh E’temadi’s disdain for galleries was legendary, and, according to these critics, warranted. E’temadi stopped holding gallery exhibitions in the 1990s in protest against the mainstream gallery scene in Tehran. As a joke, she displayed some of her works in a roadside restaurant located along a transit route for Cargo vehicles and said, “I’m amazed that artists choose to exhibit their works in galleries that demand forty percent of the sale price just to hang a piece on a tiny wall of a tiny room in which you can’t even move around.”
Despite all the criticisms, the Museum of Contemporary Art remains one of Iran’s most important cultural spaces. True, the works that comprised “Reported by Women” were so devoid of what Parvaneh E’temadi called “the psychology of feminine art” that if the names and titles were removed from the exhibition walls, it would be hard to distinguish these pieces from any modern art show anywhere in the world. Still, many visitors believed the exhibition was valuable, that it contributed something worthwhile to the culture. One young woman visitor confided, “Regardless of what expectations we had, exhibitions like this show that the many protests by women to be seen and to occupy more space have been heard — and in some places, they’ve had an impact.” The exhibition catalyzed conversation about women’s art and their role in Iran’s art history, and it also honored prominent figures of the women’s movement from past decades who had been buried under the dust of time, reminding society that the fight for women’s rights didn’t spring fully formed in Iran in the last few years.
A twenty-year-old woman wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “This is not a pipe” printed across its front pointed to one of the galleries dedicated to the Dena Art Group and told me: “I can’t believe that in the 1990s and 2000s, women in those oversized shoulder-padded manteaus down to their ankles and long scarves over their stomachs had painting groups, held group exhibitions, traveled across Iran and other countries, and lived as artists. I’m amazed that in the 1950s and 1960s, women in Iran were already experimenting with printmaking and abstract painting using such advanced techniques. Or that in the 1970s, we even had female video artists in Iran.” And in the museum café, I overheard a group of teenage girls and boys chattering loudly and excitedly about what they had just seen. As they passed around photos they had taken in the museum, they kept asking each other: “Why didn’t we know about these before?” “Why hadn’t we seen these works until today?”
When Parvaneh E’temadi was asked about her relationship with politics and the society she lived in, she replied: “Historical and social situations arise in life where a person is present while not being present” — a reference and explanation for her absence from what is called activist art and her stubborn individuality. She did not need her work to be seen, and she did not try to call it to the public’s attention, particularly in the last two decades of her professional career. It seems that the same explanation can be applied to “Reported by Women”: the silence of the absent voices of women and their art in this event is made manifest not only through the works on display, but also from the walls and streets outside. Even when they are silenced, the women report.