SPOTLIGHT ON:
Shadi Ghadirian

Respectfully regarded as one of the first Iranian photographers whose photographs altered how Western minds perceive Iranian art and society in the late 1990s, Shadi Ghadirian’s work continues to have a lasting impact at home where she lives and works in Tehran, and around the world.

BY NICK RICE

Respectfully regarded as one of the first Iranian photographers whose photographs altered how Western minds perceive Iranian art and society in the late 1990s, Shadi Ghadirian’s work continues to have a lasting impact at home where she lives and works in Tehran, and around the world.

Born in the capital of Iran in 1974, Ghadirian graduated from the Azad Art University, Tehran, in 1998 and subsequently worked at the Akskhaneh Shahr – the first museum of photography in Tehran. She faced layers of preconceptions, prejudice and contradictions as a modern Muslim woman living in Iran and her photography has always confronted and authentically expressed her experience.

Her images have featured friends and family in staged portraits that explore female identity and gender roles, censorship and geopolitics. With a deft touch of irony and a bold sense of humour, Ghadirian has depicted women as stereotypical housewives draped in veils, their heads substituted by household objects like cooking pots, brooms, and meat knives.

Ghadirian addresses issues that are specific to women in other parts of the world as well as in her home country, exploring the role and status of women against a backdrop context of religion, modernity, and the brutal futility of war.

Her singular take and treatment of taboos has significantly altered the course of Iranian contemporary photography and allowed for many successors to embrace photography as a means for artistic self-expression and socio-political comment.

Her work is held in private and public collections and has been exhibited globally, in institutions such as the British Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; LACMA, Los Angeles; Smithsonians, Washington; and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK), Vienna.