The work draws on two forms of marking imposed upon women’s bodies in Iran. In early 2000s, the Moral Police would publicly punish groups of young women in crowded squares in large cities, pouring black industrial paint onto their exposed arms and ankles. The crowds gathered; some would shout, some applaud, some curse, but everyone watched. The act was simultaneously punitive, humiliating, and spectacular.
The work also draws on a wedding tradition practised until recent decades in the eastern provinces of the country, in which the groom would burst a pomegranate against the bride at the end of the ceremony, staining her skirt and marking her as his wife.
Bringing these two forms of marking into relation, the work considers the female body as a surface upon which authority, possession, morality, and social order are inscribed. It examines the distance and unsettling proximity between ritual and punishment, celebration and humiliation, asking how acts of marking can move between the intimate, the public, and the disciplinary.
Marked | Performance | Acrylic and pomegranate on unprimed canvas | 2010 (Images courtesy of Ann Lacheiner-Kuhn)
