Earlier this month KMEWO was invited to the first UK exhibition of the Iranian artist and filmmaker Maryam Tafakory, I want to tell you what I can’t which was presented at LUX Cinema in Waterlow Park Centre in Dartmouth Park Hill between April 28- June 17, 2023.
I want to tell you what I can’t presented Maryam’s Tafakory works, Nazarbazi نظربازی and Irani Bag ایرانی کی alongside fragments of more recent work. Nazarbazi, which means the play of glances, deals with love and desire in Iranian cinema, where men and women are not allowed to touch each other. The Irani bag is textual and political analysis of censorship and intimacy in post-revolution Iran, where a bag is used to avoid touch and intimacy between men and women. Both films share something in common; despite all the above prohibitions the feelings of love and desire are still in the air and the use of any object is not enough to suppress them.
It was around one year ago, in September 2022, when the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini was beaten to death by the ‘Morality Police’ in Iran for not properly wearing her hijab. It was that incident of an unfair and absurd death that sparked the outrage and the slogan ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ became a rallying outcry during protests in Iran and all over the world. Women were protesting in the streets burning their hijabs and cutting their hair, demanding for equality and the recognition of their rights as human rights, as they could not anymore tolerate the strict rules imposed to them due to their gender. Mahsa’s death was the last straw of years of religious and patriarchal oppression. Nothing is and will be the same anymore. Iranian and Kurdish women’s struggles for equality and freedom is not something new but it is the first time it became an international matter of concern in a sense that whatever happening there is also mattering here; in a sense that human rights are universal without exceptions.
And even if a film exhibition of an Iranian artist and a revolution sparking after the death of an innocent woman in Iran do not seemingly have something in common, the truth is that both are strong political actions against the repression of totalitarian regimes suppressing any need of self-determination and self-expression. No matter how many bags will be used to avoid touching between men and women and no matter how many years of imposed hijabs will pass, the need for freedom and desire for life will always prevail manifesting in every single deed or gesture of everyday life; from an insensible touch between a man and woman to the greatest struggles for equality and freedom.
*On September 16, 2023, we will be demonstrating in the name of Mahsa Amini in Trafalgar Square. See more at: Demonstration for Mahsa Amini | MEWSo
