O(e)syan (Rebellion)
Life-size dimensions, based on the artist’s body
Mixed-media installation and performance.
” این دخترها به جاى عطر باروت را انتخاب كرده اند”
“These girls have chosen wearing bullets instead of perfumes”
This mixed-media installation uses a painted canvas not as a surface but as a standing female body, life-sized, the canvas is cut open at one edge to reveal a dense accumulation of VHS tapes packed like organs; loose tape ribbons cascade to the floor. A pair of black high-heeled shoes anchors the piece, their interiors spattered with blood to suggest both violence and the long endurance of standing. A black veil drapes the upper portion of the canvas, partially obscuring the body and some of the tapes. Across the surface, you see a Farsi slogan that reads “These girls have chosen wearing bullets instead of perfumes.”
I later learned this line came from a newspaper printed in pre-revolution Iran, celebrating women’s militarization. Drips and blood stains mark sites where the body has been “shot,” underscoring
the violence inherent in the regime’s expectations of women.
Inside the sculpture, a looped sound piece plays a lullaby sung by my grandmother, my mother, and myself. In Iranian culture throughout history, mothers have used lullabies and tales to transmit values, history, and even social and political perspectives. The themes and messages in lullabies reflect the wider culture and may also serve as a way for the mother to express her own aspirations, feelings, and intellectual or spiritual ideas. Such songs are considered a primitive form of poetry and part of the nation’s intangible cultural heritage. The lullaby I chose, translated as “Lullaby, go to sleep, your dreams are beautiful; the moonflower of the night changes into a thousand colors. Don’t wake from the dream of stories; don’t step into the city of sorrow” carries both tenderness and an undercurrent of warning, referencing monsters behind the wall and kites whose strings have been cut.
The seconds of recording on the tapes correspond, roughly, to the number of women documented as
murdered by or under the laws of the Islamic Republic. This correlation is necessarily imprecise; reported cases of femicide in Iran represent only a fraction of actual killings, as there are no accurate statistics because so many cases … go unreported or are falsely reported. The work’s excess of tape spilling from the body underscores this incompleteness, the memory exceeds what can be counted.
When the installation was shown in person and online, hundreds of Iranian women from inside Iran
and across the diaspora spontaneously sent recordings of lullabies sung by themselves or their mothers. With permission, I layered these voices into the soundtrack in a way that protects anonymity. This unanticipated contribution transforms the piece into a communal archive: what began as a personal intergenerational lullaby becomes a chorus of mothers, a quiet act of solidarity and resistance. This accumulation of voices transforms the work from an individual expression into a collective act of witnessing, where each contribution extends the emotional and cultural memory embedded in the piece. Positioned between visibility and concealment, documentation and absence, this installation asks how violence is recorded and remembered when official histories fail, and how intimate cultural practices like lullabies, poetry, and craft become vessels for collective memory and rebellion.