ReSIA (Research Seminar in Islamic Art) with Katayoun Shahandeh

The Subversive Feminine: Contemporary Iranian Women Artists Challenging Gender Paradigms

In this seminar we will examine how contemporary Iranian women artists interrogate and reclaim female subjectivity in contexts where it has been systematically constrained by both an authoritarian state and a Western gaze that persistently “others” them.

The identities constructed in their work are complex and often paradoxical, located at the interstices of Tradition and Modernity, East and West, Private and Public. They emerge as counter-discourses – forms of resistance against the state’s reductive binaries, which remain increasingly at odds with the lived realities of Iranians. Confronted with censorship and surveillance, these artists have developed visual strategies that mobilise metaphor, allegory, and performativity as tools of subversion. By unsettling normative frameworks of representation, they destabilise the authority of historical accounts, offering instead pluralised and fluid articulations of feminine identity. In doing so, they enact what might be called a subversive feminine – an insurgent subjectivity that resists containment, challenges hegemonic paradigms, and reimagines the terms of visibility and belonging.

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