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Artwork Description

Shadi Ghadirian (Tehran, 1974) is one of the most significant Middle Eastern photographers of our time. Her work explores an Iran of contrasts and paradoxes, teetering between modernity and tradition. Reflections on female identity, the ghosts of bloody conflicts (such as the Iran-Iraq War), and the ambivalence of a society constantly and precariously struggling between freedom and censorship are only some of the themes that Shadi Ghadirian examines with her unique expressive imprint. Like Everyday, created between 2000 and 2002, is a series which plays on the Iranian custom of giving domestic objects to the newly wed wife, as if to underline the role she will be called on to honour from then on. Here, in fact, we see a set of women, completely covered by floral chadors, whose faces are then concealed by everyday kitchen utensils. The are no eyes to look at, but rather an iron, a teapot, a knife, a pan or a glove. The lively colours of the chadors and the modernity of the domestic utensils constrain in suffocating anonymity and impersonality leaving no space for individualism.