 Well, good evening everybody. I'm Anna Contadini and I'm so glad that we have managed to start the Research Seminary Islamic Art or Ressia again after the polls caused by the difficulties encountered because of the pandemic. And thank you all again for your requests for the seminar to resume. I'm very pleased to have so many of you here tonight. We have moved the seminars to the Zoom platform but I hope that we'll be able to meet in person again soon. We have a series of three exciting seminars this term. You should all have received the program but if not please email me or Tanya. Today I'm very pleased to introduce you to a remarkable artist whose artistic techniques and thought processes are very interesting and actually they're very moving. And it's Sohanbari, an Iranian-British artist who moved to this country when she was a teenager. She graduated in biochemistry and worked as a research scientist for Cambridge University which has given her the basis for a deep understanding of the materials she uses in art. In 2005 she graduated again this time with an art history and fine art degree from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge and then she went on to gain a postgraduate diploma in fine art from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2006 and then an MA in fine art from Goldsmiths College in 2011. Sohala has exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is in private and public collections including the Sachi collection, LACMA, the New Art Gallery in Walsall and the National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne and she's currently working towards a solo show at the Barbican here in London for next year. As you will see her work deals with memory, trauma, displacement, biographies approached in a very personal and emotive way and set against the social and social historical background of both pre and post-revolutionary Iran. She's also a very interesting artist for the materials that she uses as we'll see. Sohala has kindly agreed to answer questions, you write them in the chat during or soon after her talk and I will collect them and read them out at the end of the seminar. Well Sohala, welcome and over to you. Thank you so much Anna, thank you Cathy, and Matt and the entire Sohala's team. It's an honor to be invited to talk about my art today and thank you each one of you for the time and for your interest in my art. So first of all, welcome to my studio. My studio is Advising Arts Centre, that's spelled W-Y-S-I-N-G that's outside Cambridge and so let me just give you a tour around my studio. I'm actually sitting at my egg-time station, this is my pigments workstation. These are all pigments I've bought from Anapathy Kree which is placed in Venice near the academia bridge. I'm sure you can find this, it's a very beautiful shop and then this is my work process. I have some egg here which is the medium for my pigments, my brushes which are kind of very tiny. I don't know if you can see that, can you see that brush? It's very tiny brushes but for miniature paintings and basically it involves getting my pigments, grinding them using a molar and a glass slab so you get exactly like the medieval period but you actually have to grind your own pigment to a flowery consistency and then I apply that paint onto my support which is a vellum. Now vellum comes in various sources, they can either be from sheep, goat or calf and I use a calf vellum in my work and actually come in as parchment or as calmscots so this is parchment, you can see it's very close up, can you see the hair follicle and you can see the dots on the vellum and can you see the dots that are from the, so they actually have been a little dots on the vellum that actually represents the hair follicles that happens on the skin of the calf and this is usually used for paper, it has a paper consistency but it's much stronger than paper and it's used for book illustration or for illuminate manuscripts, it's actually used for calligraphy and watercolour and stuff like that but what I use is actually calmscots which is slightly stronger and it has cardboard consistency and I think vellum is like imagine what the skin that's pulled over a drum is like so it's actually the same material but treated slightly differently so this calmscots actually got a coating on it which allows me to make my paintings directly on vellum without having to put just on it and as I showed you the brushes are actually very tiny so let me just show you the brush of the game, this is the brush and so I have to show you my kudol session which is on the different side of the room, this is my kudol session and kudol is actually the material that I work with and it says the black stuff that comes out of the ground in Iran and Iraq and it's not an art material and I basically diluted with turpentine in various wells and drawings which I do on paper and the drawings actually start with the most diluted form of the kudol and I build up the colour using, as I kind of build up the colour using the more concentrated form of the kudol and then this is like my station where I kind of do my let my kudol to dry and then I kind of, this is also the station that I do my geometric pattern because it's my architects table so as Anna said my interest is in political art and the theme of my work is to do with the, I'm interested in the collective trauma and the shared narratives that I talk through the individual story and I kind of add bizarre and humorous texts and elements to my work. So to continue with the theme of the collective trauma I was first of all interested in the idea of portraiture because I was interested in how I can tell the individual stories through portraiture. So the first interest came to me from 2005 when a friend of mine in Germany gave me this revolting absolutely horrible document which I I'm really sorry that I'm showing it to you but it's the first thing I had in 2005 so I'm going to have to share it with you. This is a Nazi SS members passport that he found an attic in his in his house and you can see I'm really sorry I really find it bad revolting to show this this image but anyway you can see how this clown here you can tell his physical affiliation by the portrait that he has it's actually a genuine passport so you can see everything and I was interested in in portraiture as far as the passport is concerned because as a passport contains the identity the personal identity that goes with the with the photograph of the individual and therefore you have the information about the person's age the job the height and in fact the nationality and for me the nationality was actually kind of the the way the trauma is actually contained in nationality as you can imagine if you have if you present a passport which is Islamic like Iranian or Iraqi or Syrian or Afghan passport at a border you have a different trauma which kind of speaks about the the political landscape today of the refugee crisis versus the ease of the passport shown by a British or American or Western individual holding a passport at a border so I kind of wanted to talk about trauma versus the you know the collective trauma of the nationality through the story of the individual can I have the first image please the password in front of you is shows the a passport which is a British passport that was given to me by a friend and I was interested in creating a political art using these passports and for me I was I decided to kind of create the stamp I mean with the stamp that officiated the the visa the passport in the first place I issued the passport in the first place and I decided to change the the text that was in the stamp with the text from 1960s 1950s and 1970s British and American advertising slogans because of that era that the slogans that come from address are quite bonkers actually they're quite funny they're racist and they're kind of sexist and they kind of they have these funny words that as you can see this is a mini the the image on the right hand side is an advertisement from a mini car which was advertised in 1960s late 1960s and you can see that the wording is actually repeated in the stamp in the you don't need to have a big one to be happy and I was interested in the in the wording that I use in each stamp for per nationality there's a relationship between the the wording that's used under and the nationality of the holder because here for example the British are very well known for their sort of innuendos and the puns the flavor of the humor so therefore this is kind of has this wording that is very much about the British and the humor next next image please this one is actually on a drink to make you more interesting is actually present in this stamp as well next one please the the left hand side shows a Saudi woman it's parcel from a Saudi woman and in the stamp it says reveal your inner goddess that's that's text from a and I think in Avon and Avon at birth from 1970s and on the right hand side it says just for men won't let you down again another Saudi passport and the text comes from just for men which is a hair product for men and next image please and this passport gets collaged at six passport per frame and you get the passport gets sandwiched between two planes of glass so that the viewers can actually be aware of the holder's image as well as the the genuineness of the passport from the cover so you can be aware of both sides next image please my my interest in making beautiful art and as I was starting at Goldsmith because Goldsmith is very kind of unknown for his conceptual art teachings and I decided to before I started at Goldsmith I decided to investigate the idea of making non-didactic physical work and I mean in summer of 2009 I managed to get a hold of the 500 mil container of kudal from this refinery which is outside my city in Shiraz I come from city of Shiraz and this this refinery has been part of my childhood every time I passed by in the car I was impressed by the structure which shines in the in the in the sunset or in the sun in during the dawn and it's kind of has a structure a color a smell and a noise which takes back to my childhood but it actually tells a story about the materiality being in the medium the message being in the materiality of the media the message being in the materiality of the medium so basically this material which is a black stuff that comes out of the ground that makes petrol and makes diesel and makes paint and it makes all this stuff that is not actually an art material it it contains the history of Iran in it so the medium actually contains the history of you know discovery of oil from 1908 by the British it contains the the nationalization of oil in 1951 by Mohammad Musad Derk he involves he contains the the 1953 coup of operated by CIA and Britain against the democratically elected government of Musad Derk and they removed him and they installed the Shah and then obviously the revolution happened and everything that is involved with the kudal in Iran and in fact there's the story is actually universal because we are all implicated in the consumption of kudal because kudal has environmental economic social political elements that has both human cost and has environmental cost so it actually implicates us all in its use next image please so what I started to do at Goldsmith I started using kudal and I decided to test it using various dilution mediums to actually dilute it with and I settled on turpentine and so I started to draw my family photographs and I always present my my drawings as a grid so this is a grid called Paradise Lost titled after the John Milton's epic poetry published in 1667 and the Paradise Lost contains family photographs and then please keep an eye for these abstract shapes which I kind of interspaced in my paint in my grid so I'll explain to you why they're there anyway they kind of come from all family photographs and they kind of come from dilution of kudal with turpentine next image please and this is the central image from Paradise Lost it's actually called Paradise Lost and it's based on a family photograph of I think it's from 1960s anyway the idea is like when I when I start drawing my my my drawings using kudal I draw from original photograph then I put that photograph away and I draw from that drawing and then I put that drawing away and I draw from that drawing and so on until the image becomes pixelated and it becomes abstraction and becomes like a abstract form of or pixelated form of the original image and in in this process any spills any happy accidents any drops on my brush any kind of blotches any lack of information any loss of information gets incorporated in the next drawing therefore for me this process becomes like metaphor for memory because as you kind of remember you don't remember anything as precisely as you know we would like you always have some lack of memory and you have some addition to memory so I think that the process actually mimics the idea of the or is metaphor for the idea of memory as memory falls in and out of the lens of you know and falls in out of focus and next image please and this image is called the signatures and I just wanted to show you how the size of these these drawings were actually on an A4 chamfered paper and you can see how the bleed of the kudal actually goes beyond beyond the the tape I put a tape around the image I'm using this tape and I kind of occasionally the the kudal actually seeps beyond it and I quite like the halo next this is called a full moon in my pocket this is an image of my mother myself and my sister and I just want to show you how the different treatments of the drawings are next image and in this grid the images that apart from family photographs images based on media images from the era so you can see this is on the left hand side is an image of myself and my father and my father's friend around the time of the revolution and this is collaged from two photographs which are basically from the 1979 overthrow of the Shah you can see how the Shah statues pulled down imagine how Saddam Hussein's sculpture was or statue was pulled down so these kind of images that repeat in history they kind of have this um relationship between my family and you know um and the event of the time and the image on the right hand side is actually the death of Beno Ahnazurg Beno Ahnazurg was a 26 year old German student who was killed in 1967 by a German police as he was demonstrating against the state visit of the Shah of Iran and um so the Shah was visiting to the West Berlin in 1967 on the 2nd of June and he was on his way there there was some anti-shah and pro-shah demonstrations and the crowd got violent and they got out of hand and the police overreacted to their violence and Beno got shot in the back of the head and I include that in the image in my group because I was interested in how um events in one country can have repercussions in another country and I was just trying to say that we are all connected through this politics and just like COVID we are actually kind of aware of how interconnected humanity really is next image please and these are the abstract shapes I was telling you earlier these are actually conceptual based on the idea of the my my BMXR so um I called it the I seen the body electric which is titled after the world treatment poetry but they are considered to be self-portraits and it's self-portraits because since I left Iran in 1978 I haven't lived in Iran I have not been living with my family since I was a teenager so I was thinking about how I can represent the absence how can I represent my my being absent or being exiled from Iran so I decided to draw the negative spaces between people in family album in photographs that were taken post 1979 revolution and I draw the negative spaces between people as my self-portrait that's where I should have been therefore there are my um you know there are me so if you imagine on the left hand side you can see this figure is actually has a space which is got a forehead there's a nose there's a mouth there's a chin there's a shoulder and there's a shoulder of a baby and a chin and a cheek and a forehead of a baby and then this is a lamp which hangs in the middle of the room so I think you can understand how this um this um um shapes actually function this is on the right hand side this is an image from between some of his legs this is um uh the edge of the trousers the bottom of the the top of the boots and then again the edge of the trousers and the stretch between their legs and this um material is a 20 carat gold and I buy my my gold as a um loose gold from Cornelisons and the reason I use this gold and kudo in this drawing is because I was interested in how there are both the um most precious commodities in the world and uh the both back us dollar and I was interested in how um you know in my this is the reason why we are having political turbulence we have recession because of these two materials and this is why I'm an exile in my country I'll say an exile outside my country next image please so am I am I art I'm interested in the era of 1925 and to 1979 this is the the Pahlavi regime era and uh so before the um Pahlavi regime um um came into power Iranian women were dressed like the image on the left hand side this is how women had to dress in public space and um they had to wear a fulyak nashmack with a burqa and a and a there and they had to walk on the left hand side of the road and if they wanted to speak they had to put the half finger in the heart and had to talk like that to a man that did not marry to they're not related to and this is all told to me by my by my grandmother so I have first first time experience of this um second time experience of it so I'm I'm kind of interested in how in 1935 as I show which is this figure here we went to Turkey met our Turk and was inspired by his modernization in Turkey and he was um at Turk as you know he kind of modernized Turkey by unveiling women he changed the alphabet and he industrialized Turkey so when Venetza came back from Turkey um he had taken over the the Fajr identity in 1925 so almost nine years later in 1936 he decided to unveil women of Iran but he decided to unveil them by force without any consent so the women were forced to wear hats and dresses and also the men were um ordered to wear um western um outfits so the western suit and so it's very much like what Peter the Great did to Russia and um I was interested in how these two men who actually forced their people to actually change were interested in modernizing their country they wanted to show their people as less as othering as less as less than um less than they're othering and to kind of bring them to the same level as the western people and um you know my grandmother said to me um this this actually this event actually the forcing unveiling of women in Iran actually split the country into two factions to two camps so the the conservative people actually remained very angry at the parallel regime for for you know following the western um aesthetically fashion and and ideologies and the other side which actually embraced the the liberal the emancipation and the liberalization of women because Russia actually opened schools for girls and his son actually allowed women to vote but my grandmother that both my grandmother's came from different teams so one of my grandmother's said to me I embraced the unveiling I loved it I my mother was um I like to go to school she went to university I actually educated but my other grandmother my father's grandmother she never embraced the the um the um unveiling and she said it was like as if a government is asked me to wear a bikini and then if you don't wear it then you get arrested so it was like this kind of splitting which is like as if you know exactly how Brexit actually split the the British country I feel like this was like the instigator for splitting Iranian into two different factions next please so for my for my paintings I was interested in kind of um bringing all these physical stuff into my art and I thought how can I do this so I started to first of all my first paintings were involving the kudal as the flesh color services all done in kudal unveiling and the um the patterns behind they are done in Malachite and that is last July and there's gold in there and there's um egg tempera unveiling and um the idea of the philosophy behind the patterning in Islamic art as you know is about um sort of there's there's a never the patterns are never innocent so the pattern has a meaning and this pattern of stars and and geometric patterns and arabesque pattern meant to show the infinity of god and vastness of universe so um you know it's meant to represent the idea of galaxies and stars and and you know the fact that this this pattern can go on for eternity so that sort of represents the vastness of um universe and greatness of god and also I wanted to talk about delirium so the idea that Islamic architecture particularly mosques so any other Islamic um building where it has um over decoration everything everything inside is decorated is um partly because the idea is like as a viewer enters the space you become you enter a state of delirium so that you lose a sense of yourself and start contemplating god so I decided to adopt this philosophy for my art and for my um so as as if you enter my paintings you can actually start going a bit dizzy because the patterns actually are everywhere and I kind of use this idea of payloads that are involved in the um medieval and iconic paintings of western um to incorporate to incorporate it in my paintings but anyway this um next next image please and as I said um my paintings originally started with my my family photographs as my father did not just focus on women's painting this is this image is actually this size my paintings are about very the the very miniature actually so um they kind of um uh have um um the maximum size I actually go to is um this size so my my paintings actually start by doing a um a cartoon of the image I do the cartoon of the image and then I uh and that's how it's always done through medieval eras but you have to do a cartoon of the image before you you finish the um before you started the painting and then fill in the colors this is something I'm doing for the barbecue shop so um and then I fill in the colors and then you kind of um and the medieval paintings a lot of the uh pre-paint under under coats were actually green or ochre or or brown but because my paintings are from black and white photographs they actually start with a gray background and I build up the color on top and so um and for me this um this um uh idea that men had to um um this is cowboy Ali my father makes a rubbish cowboy actually and I think I was interested in how men in Iran had to embrace the western um um outfit and for me this is like taking the one more step and my father's actually become a cowboy and because Iran was looking at the west through the lens of Hollywood and um so uh in my paintings there are lots of symbols which I put in my and for example the the cacti because they are phallic they represent the idea of patriarchy and I always have a cacti which lots of needles which is kind of I'm just trying to say that patriarchy is actually painful for men and women that actually hurt the entire culture next image please this is again my father in a painting called Khosrow and Shirin Khosrow was a king um it's a mythological story of uh Iranian um um history it's um Khosrow was a Persian king who fell in love with the Shirin who was an Armenian princess and he saw her secretly bathing and he fell in love with her and he married her and um his son who fell in love also with his stepmother he he stabbed his father in the heart as he was lying next to his wife so it's like a very tragic story like a Romeo and Juliet story but anyway it's um it's a mythological story but here for me I think there's a relationship between the sitter and the um the background so you can see in the in the enlarged detail part you can see that Shirin is actually giving the Khosrow a a um a seductive look and Khosrow has just finished throwing flowers at her feet so there's a there's an interaction between the foreground and the background not sure where the reality and the fantasy is and and so I think um this is kind of brings out the mythology of Iranian Iranian um stories which have very much a political um language to them next image please and just also to show you quickly that this um my early images actually included my family photographs as well this is my mother this is me and her stomach she was pregnant with me and this is my first self-portrait actually as a baby in her tummy and this is my um this is a painting of me and my brother and my sister and the reason it's for a beautiful tragedy is because this is the um a photograph of my last holiday with my sister and brother before I came to England and the painting has been inspired by the Japanese woodcut and perhaps even Fango's um paintings next image please and this is called Dark Horse the Dark Horse is um basically a um a um painting which talks about feminism and this is my mother sitting in a in a perhaps in 1970s or 1960s background as I said I think um a pattern for me is never innocent pattern actually is used for branding so you can actually use it for placing a person in a in an era or in a social strata so for example if you see a branding like a Gucci pattern you can talk about a certain social affordability economic affordability and if you see a golden brown and orange pattern from a 1970s council state carpet then you can see how that kind of talks about that social strata so for me patterning is never innocent it's actually tells about the person and it places them in a in a certain uh era and a person in a certain social strata so this is a woman in 1970s or 1960s late 1960s she don't you don't know you don't know whether she's sitting in front of the horse or whether the horse is going out of their head but um the horse is actually rearing on his high on her on her hind legs against the left left her which is in the left way which is in the vegetation at the back against again the images from the patriarchy and then on the woman's side the landscape is very flat it's very green there's a light to the horizon and the male side there's this drier harsher more sort of like a grander landscape with with harsh mountains that you have to climb and the sky is kind of very kind of plain next and again this is a painting which is called another birth it's very tiny it's about 10 by 13 centimeters and it's basically my mother as a modern um um in virgin Mary painting so she's sitting in a halo of stars these are all out of malachite and in her arms is me lying there and in my body there's an image of a bird's eye view of a landscape that's because I I I left Iran and I became an exile so next image this is a conquest of the garden and as I kind of exhibit this this painting I put in the bracket google the title so that actually the the book becomes partly performative by the viewer so I should google the title with the poem of photo files that comes up and you can actually then read the poetry and become aware of the language I'm actually using to talk about feminism in this kocha which is typical of town houses in Iran which is a um um a um um paved kocha with a border of plants there's no plants in the garden except these pistas are growing in the in the ground as flowers and they are punching the air because they're protesting and this pattern actually places the woman in the non-western background so you know that she's talking about a woman that is in a non-western environment could be in a in any Middle Eastern background but in a in a kind of like a university Middle Eastern or Islamic background which is I think these kind of issues are very um pertinent to all all these cultures next image please and again this painting is one that I get prompted to kind of participate from the viewer so on the left hand side you see the image of my mother and myself my mother is in positive and unpainted negative and as as you kind of take a look at the title tells you to take a photograph of the image and then use an app to invert the image and then you can see me in positive and my mom becomes negative and that's because I was split up from my mother from an early age and this you can never exist in the same university actually exist in parallel universities next image and again this is uh again the idea of the um um uh halos and the you know again the stars and the cosmos and the idea that this is actually representing the vastness of universe and greatness of god and you can see my mother and my auntie the both are actually both pregnant for this photograph and I decided to put myself and my cousin in the painting and you can see that both my both our umbilical cords are connected to the flower pattern that goes over the dress and my auntie is actually offering the extension of the the pattern to my mother who's touching the leaf and it's called children of the revolution because all the children are born in 1960s 1970s they ended up either being sent away from the country as exiles or that they had to like the film from um by Marjan Satrapi the um persopolis which tells the story of not just by Marjan but or the story of all of us who were sent away from Iran and tells the story of all the children that grew up and they had to fight the Iwanu Rock War in 1980s so I think this this is the generation that were really affected by the revolution and just to say that the reason I paint on Vellum is that I kind of want to um I paint on calf Vellum because calf is the sacrificial animal that is just using most monastic religions and for me it represents the sacrifice of the individual next please and this one is actually basically um for my show at the barbeque next year um it started in 2018 and 2019 I was um 2018 I was at the British School at Rome and I was watching binge watching vanilla films and then I decided that I wondered what happened to our film stars and our actors and our actresses and um I decided to paint um the portraits and I found out that after the revolution not only were the women were forced to wear the veil and not wear Islamic hijab and not only were they sort of forced to actually behave in a in a back you know in a certain way but the one thing that were universally happened to all actors and all female male actors as well as writers, singers, dancers they were all arrested taken to every prison and they were forced to sign a tober letter tober means repentance letter depending their sins for whatever act or whatever platform of right they were occupying and in that um a lot of them a lot of them but not all of them were banned from ever appearing in the in that platform and a lot of them actually had to kind of um start um emigrating or they had to live in anonymity and this is a um the portrait of a um Umar Umar Volukov Vasili who um was the first woman singer who in 1924 sang without a veil in public and here you can see this um uh idea of magic realism so magic realism for me is actually kind of um important because I was interested in the idea that um um magic realism allows an artist or writer to speak about unspeakable truths to criticize the culture without being pinned down allowing us to have a wiggle room for the meaning and it actually allows us to give multiple meaning to a painting I never explained my art so I always need my paintings I don't fully explain my art I should say and I always need my paintings open to the viewers to unpack so um for example here these flowers are you know either they're in a vase or they're actually are the flowers that have been thrown at her feet because she was a singer and she you know you act as a performer actually there's flowers that thrown at you but in the in the detail you can see how this um there's a um um um an angel the Persian miniature angel was offering a flower to the to the um to the singer so that's like um sort of paying homage to her brilliance and a fantastic singing and of course she died in 1956 which is before the revolution but even then the conservatives allowed this allowed her body to be buried next to her family she came from a very religious family the road got buried in a mosque but she was this allowed to have her body buried in a mosque because she was a singer next image please this is Gush Gush is a international singer pop star she's a actor she's a fashion icon and here the magic realism shows itself in the detail so you can see the the the painting behind the sitter is actually in flesh color and the sitter is actually painted in in gray so you're not sure who's the reality who's actually occupying the real space and these patterns actually have double meaning they're actually for me to present the flames so they kind of can be either she's a hot stuff like the the icon of flame or they can show the flames of hell but um this this pattern on the floor in Islam in Islamic art that actually represents the cosmos so I wanted to show that the universe set her feet next this is Jamila which is a painting called the dancing queen she was a dancer international dancer she danced for Aristotle Onassis she danced for Henry Kissinger she was the most famous Iranian dancer international with Liszt and I mean she was just like the highest paid dancer that we had in Iran and she was after the revolution she was had her properties confiscated and she was banned from dancing and like Gush she moved to LA and now that's where she lives and dances for the um she dance for the um expats expats there next this is Furizan after the title is called hey baby I'm a star she's actually sitting in a bedroom scene that's because um Furizan was a top actress she had um um after the revolution she was arrested and all her properties including her house her bank account was Furizan and all her films were burned and that's because she actually appeared in some very soft sexual films where she actually kissed a man on a bed I mean it was just that that sort of to date and um she she had to basically live in an anonymity and she died in in on alone and I think that's very important actually um tell her story because she was like um maybe one drop for example she was that big in Iran she was a top star next this is um Toba Toba means repentance as I said and it's a portrait of Zahra Khosham and Khosham was a actress actor I should say sorry and she was um the only person who was one of the very few people who was um considered chasing up during the uh film Farsi era which is like pre-revolutionary Iran where she was actually allowed to continue with her acting career so the story has to include some of these women that were allowed to continue to to perform next image please again this image is quite small this is called the woman in the mirror first to Janabi first to Janabi was an actor from 1971 until 1978 and her acting involved her to do some sexual scenes in in some films and I think she did nine or ten films and in this she actually appeared almost nude and she did some sex scenes for this as well as losing everything as well as her properties her her money her everything she ever owned she actually had a death sentence that was um um decreed on to her and she um this she skipped that and she lived for the next 20 years in hiding and she got addicted to drugs and died of drug overdose at the age of 50 so basically I wanted to tell the stories of these women because many of these women came from poor and conservative backgrounds where they had to be abandoned by the family or they they were just like um either been abandoned by them or they had to abandon abandon them in order to continue with their platform and for their arts and um in order to achieve a national and international status they were partly responsible through their brave and courageous acts and a passion for their arts to become pioneers for liberation and sexual emancipation of Iranian women they were working in a title of the cultural divide that allowed Iranian women to gain so much in a very short space of time in a generation I feel it's more important to put the stories for the world to see Fira Kahlo once said as she was asked why she paints flowers and she said it's because she doesn't want them to die and this is the reason I want to paint these women because I don't want them to die I don't want them to die in anonymity I don't want them to die in in um I learned death and I want to give them a platform back thank you so much for your time thank you so much uh Soheila this was really fascinating um talk and so emotional and also you know you conveyed all the layers it was like a stratigraphy of meaning work and connections with with the social historical um situations but also questions of memories of biographies and very very interesting um I I hope that uh please put some questions or points uh to to to Soheila and while um people are doing that I wanted to ask you whether you could I was very uh interested in this concept of magical reality and when I say a little bit more about that the magical realism is actually happens in countries where there's censorship by the government so whether it's like South American countries or whether it's like Iran or basically it allows the artists or the writers it's actually much more prominent amongst writers so it allows the writers and the artists to actually talk about social criticism and to to be critical of their um realities of their living without being pinned down and without having the meaning that is kind of very obvious so it allows to create a multi narrative work that is open to the viewer to unpack and to kind of do over their own conclusion and actually allows them to actually criticize a culture which they can't they allow them to have a big old room so they can't be pinned down as you are so I use that magic realism because my my my work is very kind of layered and allows magic realism actually allows the the different meanings such exist at the same time thank you very much there are some comments in the chat so Ilaria Gianfrancheschi says thank you so much it was very touching thank you for sharing these stories and Hamid Kashmir Shakan has some questions thanks for your presentation unfortunately I missed the first part of the talk and so I might have missed this part as most of your works actually depict different autobiographical stories I wonder how you would locate your work in the last series in particular within orientalists and exotic context namely how you see what meet the pre-existing expectation as an Iranian British artist how would you try to avoid self-othering process and being gazed through those reductive readings of your work I think thank you so much for your question it's very interesting actually I think the other thing is something that you cannot help and as an artist I think one is constantly asked about you know first thing that the people said to me is how do you feel like if I've been a woman British artist you know like or Iranian being a woman artist and I'm thinking you never asked that from Luke Toyman so what did you ask me you know it's like why didn't you ask a man why how does it feel about being a Belgian artist about being a Belgian male artist you never asked that from them so I think other things like something that's no other than us and that's something you can't help and I can't ever shed my national nationality skin but as far as how do I see my work in the context of then um um so I have a question again was it like so so yes so how would you locate your work yes within orientalist and exotic context and how would you sort of uh go against uh self-adhering yourself you know being gazed through those reductive readings of your work like I said I can't help reductive the activity of people's gaze on me and I can't escape that but I feel like it's important to kind of put my art as a within the context of um illuminated manuscripts and about how my work actually continues with the same in Persian miniatures actually you know I contains the same principles and disciplines that have been universally used in the Persian miniatures so I think it's it's it's kind of like um it's basically um speaks about the same um principles that have been used by al-zayyapa for example or all the gajar portraiture which has happened in the gajar dynasty um I think it's called I'm really I can't remember its first name but my paintings actually can relate to the traditional paintings of um Persian miniatures which I kind of bring to the modern by um adding the um Persian miniatures mixed in with um language of the western um depiction of figurative and and I kind of mix it all together because I think I'm a collage of both Persian and British um values and and experiences and histories so I think my my painting actually spans both these um sort of um continents actually so I think I could say you feel like you fit within a tradition I feel within a tradition but actually I bought so much from the the western language that I think because my I think it's a very difficult question to answer actually because I have to um be honest and I have to say that my paintings are what they are as an artist you can't really analyze yourself so much because this is like your own your own um if I ask you why do you like a certain way you know you use your handwriting this is how you actually make your art so um I'm trying to sort of put something into a sensible sentence so that I can make myself understood I think it's um I am a collage of the cultures and my education is from partly mainly from Britain and partly from Iran because my technique comes from my father my father told me my father told me I had to attempt to take me so I kind of learned everything from him but I've added my language of the um whatever I've learned from Goldsmiths and you know Chelsea and I'm the rescue of course everyone is kind of like a um but someone actually said someone actually said you know to understand you have to sort of you have to sort of the world so I think to understand you have to sort of the world in a way so I'm a I'm a collage of everything so if I didn't answer your question properly but it's very difficult to answer that sort of question and yeah yeah thank you very much then there is Sandra Louison who says I'm a real fan of of your work as Soheila knows and she says I like your emphasis on the voiceless place in the female subject as the main focal point is empowering disrupts the narrative of patriarchy or any other form of control particularly of the female body yes absolutely and because I think after the revolution there's been uh I mean my focus is on Iranian women image because after the revolution there's been a lack of image of women and I think a lot of female artists that have been working on this Iranian artists actually focusing mainly on bell work and I was interested in not representing women in a bell I was interested in empowering women actually telling an alternative story of the women empowerment the emancipation from the you know from the you know getting hold of their own sexual agency you know I was interested in kind of presenting an alternative image of the Iranian women that one that is not spoken about by other artists so absolutely Sandra it's absolutely this is my my my goal thank you for your points and Cathy Shahan says thank you so much for this wonderful talk your work is very personal as you mentioned the meaning when showing this work and an initiated viewer would not grasp many of your symbolism and you address this if at all well I I kind of address it in times like this or actually I leave it to the viewer to unpack there's often there's a little text that goes in my paintings you know often in a catalog or in the form of um you know audio audio explanation but you know I think if um as an artist I think it's very difficult to actually put so much of what you intend to people to see in your paintings because like I said as an artist all you can do is make your art and it's up to people to unpack it but of course it helps to have text and you know to explain my paintings but I don't expect people to understand as they come across my paintings and it's always interesting to actually talk to people after they've seen my painting with that realizing what my intentions were because I actually tell me sometimes oh I saw this in it and I'm thinking that's that's actually a very bad point because you know just the fact that I have character as representing patriarchy it doesn't mean that that's exactly how I want you to always read it it could be that you want to see it as a you know this man in a in a landscape which is not even Iranian it's like American background you know so I don't mind it but I think it's always for most artists that use language of magic realism they need to have a little key or like a text that comes in the catalog that can kind of hint at various ways of using symbolism metaphors that you can then unpack the paintings with but that only comes with the catalog and comes with the book and comes with more information. Thank you um if there are any other questions so yes there is one from Roxana Zenhari thank you very much fascinating works and touching talk I just I'm just wondering about the choice of the geometric patterns which are more from Morocco is that a visual decision or you consider a special concept for that? Well it was a decision that I had to take because geometric patterns that were in Iran they were kind of I have actually used them a lot of the time but there are some patterns which are used by Iranians that are Moroccan and I think there's this cost-cultural sharing of images and patterns which of course they're originated in one country but they're used by many countries and I can tell you some architecture in Shiraz which uses Moroccan patterns so it doesn't mean that just because it's Moroccan it's only used in Morocco but of course what I'm trying to say is like this issues are actually very much to do with the universal Middle Eastern issue for women and it's actually an Islamic women issue so I'm using these patterns as I use Persian patterns and I use Islamic patterns as a whole to talk about these stories of Islamic women and specifically about Iranian women but I'm actually talking about the bigger Islamic women and their you know feminism and issues concerning them thank you for that question that's actually thank you and Samina Meira says thank you for introducing for the first time to many of us tonight myself included your point and work count me as one of your most recent fans thank you so much my question is this where or what is your ideal environment for displaying your art okay so ideally I think my art has to be in a museum and it has to be accessible to everyone as I said I have some of my work in museums and I feel like as an artist I think that's the best place so that's the public space I don't like whenever you sell a painting to a private collection that's like in a way the worst thing because although the money is actually very welcome but to have a painting in a private collection actually having it locked away in somebody's house so that's that's the worst deal but the best deal is actually having it in a public place in a in a restaurant actually or in a any place where there's people actually going to come encounter and I feel like there's ought to be more art more art available to people to children even schools you know why not have an exhibition space in any every school why not have exhibition space in libraries and public spaces that people can actually enjoy not only to look at but to understand another culture and another way of thinking so yeah I mean any any public place is good enough for me thank you nice um I have another question which is slightly connected with that and you know I was quite impressed when you first when we first talked that your art is is quite small as you and you know when you look at it and on the picture on the slides it it can look but it emphasizes diamonds but but you know I think that it would work quite well as is also big uh you know in terms of I don't know I mean the the patterning the colors the very vibrant colors could probably work you know it's a big piece of art as well I was wondering what what you think about that whether you can explain a little bit more why you want this but yeah the biggest the biggest drawing I've ever done is this bit so this is the size of my biggest drawing and if these miniatures are as small as because traditionally they're meant to be book illustrations they're like illuminating manuscripts that actually meant to contain the book and they're related to the to the miniatures that were done for the elizabethian miniatures so that we can carry the we can carry the person's photograph of painting with you as a you know like an icon for worship or as an image to actually contain with your with yourself so that you can actually look at it and enjoy so the idea that miniatures actually are there as a valid kind of like they have a history which goes back for many many years goes back to icon paintings and in fact before that so I'm very good question but I feel like for me as a child when I was a little girl my father used to leave me a shahname which is a book of kings in Iran and for me I think I was interested in how the entire story could be told like is it the entire world was contained in a smaller space it's like as if because there was no there's no perspective in this painting do you mention paintings there there was like the figure would be repeated in the painting and my father would point his finger to one figure and he said this is this is what's happening here and this is what's happening there I was fascinated how tiny tiny spaces like and and you can tell so much stories about contains so much stories and I was actually interested in how Tomax was a German abstract artist she talks about how her abstract paintings they have to fit her face and I thought that's kind of like interesting thing to say to have a painting which gets your face because I think anything more that would be lost you know and for me I think the idea is like because I'm a trained miniature painter because I use a tempera because the process is very slow it will take me a year to finish a painting that would be a large painting whereas the painting for me takes six to eight weeks for a small painting which is still very long time because I work very long hours on an art none or an art monk I should say I don't do anything except my art so I feel like it would it would be practical and I wonder whether it would lose its delicateness you know if it was bigger than I think what I would tend to do if I'm making a bigger painting I would make the the pattern exactly the same size but make the the figures you know make more figures but the the detail would still be this small because I feel like as you make the pattern bigger I think you lose something in this in a in a delicateness of the of the paintings but thank you for the question thank you any other question I can't see anything more in the chat um oh Hamid Keshmi Shakan again how would you relate your work to pop art and pop culture in general well there's some paintings which have done which are very pop artish and you can see them in the Barbican I hope that when you can come to Barbican you see these paintings my husband's living in the room so I think pop art is um well I borrow a lot of things from a lot of various movements I have the Japanese woodcut in my paintings I showed you about from Henri Rousseau in my mother's painting I bought from um um Goya I bought it from so pop art I have some paintings which I haven't got access to right now but if you come to see my show in Barbican there are some pop artish paintings that are there so I don't really like to classify my art as a specific type because then I shut the door and all the other influences so um of course as a western woman living in west I'm actually inspired and influenced by a lot of art so you know um I'm inspired by it I mean I do use it I have used it in my art yeah thank you and Sandra Lewison says the miniature scale is a more intimate encounter um going back to the previous point and Cathy relating to the last point the notion of hybridity yeah yes and I think it's to do with um absolutely I think as I said I'm a collage of both cultures Persian and English and I feel like um I don't know where my English part starts and where my English my Iranian bit stops so it's kind of like it's like my handwriting and and like when I look at the painting the painting I look at the image when I look at the photograph the photograph animates in front of my eyes so I don't my imagination is like as if I'm not in control of what my imagination wants that painting to become that image to become so I don't really put that much process in the in the idea of like how um the language I'm going to use or what influences I'm going to use the the image comes to life for me as a as a ready man as you are I just imagine you look at the image and then the kind of comes to me so I don't know where this comes from I have no idea where my inspirations are from I think I'm pretty crazy you are a renaissance artist I don't know this possibly I have no idea that would be a great thing to be but I feel like um I think the only thing I can say is like I've been possessed by evil spirit that makes me want to make art not evil okay are there any other comments otherwise um we can close here I want to remind everybody to come I think it's next Thursday actually the 2nd of December is six o'clock for Natasha Morris from the Court Institute so please join us also Soheila you join us thank you very much thank you very much thank you today for everyone's time and thank you Anna and Kathy and Matt Matt everyone for your help and for everybody thank you so much Soheila for the most interesting talk thank you so much a virtual applause thank you bye bye bye thank you for your time bye