“she [medial woman] experiences a destiny not her own as though it were her own and loses herself in ideas which do not belong to her.” –Toni Wolff

The ‘Iranian woman’ has been subject to a sustained process of panegyrical representation in post-revolutionary Iranian society. Since 1979, these representations have produced a visual language of recurring tropes and mediated identities, reducing the complexity of individual and collective identity to a limited field of cultural and political signifiers.

Sharing the same generational lineage as these mediated figures, the series turns this inherited visual language into a site of scrutiny. Through exclusively female spaces and objects carrying cultural, historical, and sociopolitical associations, the photographs examine how identity becomes legible through repetition and stereotype. Rather than resolving these representations, the work inhabits their contradictions, considering the distance between lived experience and its mediated image. (These works were commissioned by the Women and the Canon Conference at the University of Oxford.)

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