Post Islamic Revolution and Women in Iran: Interrogating Identity through Photography

The Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran brought drastic changes in the lives and identities of Iranian women. Women who participated in the rebellion against the Shah’s rule for the sake of safeguarding their religion found their voices unheard. The public space which they occupied during the revolution soon turned into an alien space to them. The ‘chador’, the traditional loose garment that covered one from head to toe, which they wore in defiance of Shah’s westernizing tendencies, became a compulsory dress code for women in public spaces after the revolution. Hence, the post Islamic revolutionary period witnessed Tehran losing its hues and colours, with women in public spaces made invisible through a compulsory dress code. Shirin Neshat, the Iranian visual artist living in America as an exile, could sense this betrayal meted out on women by the state when she returned to her native land after a long period of twelve years. She left Iran and went to the USA for higher studies when she was a teenager but could not return to her native land after her studies because of the Islamic revolution and the war with Iraq which followed soon. Both incidents had a horrifying impact on the land and its people. The war torn Iran could not keep its promise to its women who were active participants in the rebellion. As an artist, Neshat’s response to this drastic change in Iranian women’s identity was materialized in the photographic series titled Unveiling and Women of Allah. The photographs presented the self portraits of the artist herself with lines from famous Iranian poets inscribed in Farsi script upon the face and fingers. The present paper is an attempt to study the photographs from these series to analyze how Neshat surfaced the process of identity formation in the context of the post Islamic revolutionary period in Iran.