Iranian Artist Morphs Into Marilyn to Protest Abuse of Women
Tara Inanloo
Tara Inanloo via Bloomberg
"raped...attacked...used...broke...exhausted ...so sick...still strong? The beauty is dead darling!'', a self portrait by Iranian artist Tara Inanloo. Inanloo is a 21-year-old artist who is based in the U.K.
"raped...attacked...used...broke...exhausted ...so sick...still strong? The beauty is dead darling!'', a self portrait by Iranian artist Tara Inanloo. Inanloo is a 21-year-old artist who is based in the U.K. Photographer: Tara Inanloo via Bloomberg
Tara Inanloo
Tara Inanloo via Bloomberg
"I'm in love with your sister. What's her name?", a self-portrait by Iranian artist Tara Inanloo. Inanloo is a 21-year-old artist who is based in the U.K.
"I'm in love with your sister. What's her name?", a self-portrait by Iranian artist Tara Inanloo. Inanloo is a 21-year-old artist who is based in the U.K. Photographer: Tara Inanloo via Bloomberg
Tara Inanloo
Tara Inanloo via Bloomberg
"This is just a birthday card for a vampire...", a self-portrait by Iranian artist Tara Inanloo. Inanloo is a 21-year-old artist who is based in the U.K.
"This is just a birthday card for a vampire...", a self-portrait by Iranian artist Tara Inanloo. Inanloo is a 21-year-old artist who is based in the U.K. Photographer: Tara Inanloo via Bloomberg
Iranian women are usually pictured swathed in long black veils. Not Tara Inanloo.
The 21-year-old artist, who is based in the U.K., has started to portray herself wearing very little.
“I photograph the different women that I discover inside me,” Inanloo says in an interview in London. “They can be a glamorous Marilyn Monroe, a 1960s prostitute or an innocent girl. How long must we depict Iranian women in black veils? I thought it was time we crossed the boundaries.”
Inanloo is expressing the frustrations of a generation that has to balance the restrictions of post-1978 theocracy with the liberation of the Facebook age. Since Iran’s cleric- led Islamic Revolution three decades ago, the country’s women have to wear headscarves and loose coats. The government views U.S.-generated pop culture as a threat, and controls art -- banning nudity and inspecting works before they are shown.
Inanloo’s first London show, at the Old Truman Brewery in June, featured self-portraits with clothes.
She already had produced the “Illegal Images” series, appearing as a blonde siren wearing only bright red lipstick, nail polish and a necklace. She looks like Monroe, sitting in the kitchen or bedroom of her home in central England.
Demand for Iranian art is growing. At a Christie’s International Dubai auction in April 2008, a bronze sculpture by Parviz Tanavoli sold for $2.84 million, setting a record for a Middle Eastern artist. The previous month, Farhad Moshiri sold his crystal-studded piece “Eshgh” (“Love”) for $1.05 million at a Bonhams first auction in Dubai.
Lipstick Mirror
Inanloo’s series “Green Is the Color of Her Kind” was on display this summer at the Free Range art and design show. Her self-portraits recall those of U.S. artist Cindy Sherman, a similarity that, she says, her teacher spotted early on.
“Although the name Cindy Sherman wasn’t familiar to me at that time, she turned out to be one of the most influential photographers in my work,” says Inanloo. She’s inspired by Sherman’s assuming of different identities in her photos.
Inanloo regrets that in Iran, moral and artistic limits are imposed by society itself, and by middle-class families in cosmopolitan Tehran not just the regime.
The artist says that her father was disturbed by her self-portraits, and that they weren’t even the nudes.
“He was crying,” she says. “He asked me to remove them from my website, or forget that he was my father.”
Nick Cave
Aside from self-portraits, Inanloo -- who says she enrolled at film school in Iran at age 14 -- has worked in fashion photography and taken shots of rock musicians, including Nick Cave and Gary Numan.
The artist is aware that she may never be able to go back home because of the nature of her work. Yet she is ready to take risks and is looking for a gallery to exhibit the nudes, which she aims to sell, though no price tag has been put on them yet.
“She invites the spectator to gaze at her image, at the prohibited body of an Iranian woman,” says Manchester-based Armindokht Shooshtari, who is writing a thesis on changes in the way women are represented in Iranian visual culture. “These images will challenge the viewer, since she is depicting Iranian women in a different way from what the world has seen so far through the work of Iranian photographers.”
To contact the reporter on the story: Ali Sheikholeslami in London at alis2@bloomberg.net.
Rate These Stories
Rate this Page