From Miniatures to Mixiatures: An Interview with Soody Sharifi
by Pamela Karimi

Soody Sharifi is a professional Photographer who has lived and worked
in Houston, Texas since 1974. Her photographs have been exhibited around the world. She is the recipient of several national awards, including the Cultural Art Council of Houston.

Q. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, governmental institutions demanded gender segregation in stairwells, corridors, prayer halls, and lounges. New rules either limited or barred inter-gender interactions on university campuses, in sports stadiums, and on public transportation. Despite these restrictions, the Islamic Republic encouraged women to be present in public—present but veiled. This concealed female is highlighted in most of your works. But your young, veiled, female teenagers somehow contest Islamic public life as they mingle with boys, play the guitar, and install illegal satellite dishes. These Muslim looking teenagers who nevertheless live non-Islamic lives, also as you mention in your website, “challenge the Muslim expectation of propriety.” Can you elaborate on this?

A. When I returned to Iran in 1999 after 21 years, I was appalled by the idea of covering myself and by the fact that all the women with whom I grew up were forced by the Islamic government to cover themselves. As hard as this was for me to accept at that time, I knew that the late Shah's father did something similar, made a political choice about the appearance of women during the 1930's when he decreed that all women must unveil. And while I personally support this move as progressive, for my grandmother, who was veiled at the time, it was an abrupt and unwelcome change. She did not bathe for a whole month, since she refused to go out and use a public bath without her cover. It seems that the power of the patriarchy has always been defined by controlling women's bodies. The personally and politically charged issues that surround the whole notion of cover inspired my first series: “The Self-Portrait” series.

However, in spite of my feminist aversion to the imposition of the cover, after several visits to Iran I realized that Hijab has been a fact of everyday life in Iran for almost a quarter of century. And that over the years, these women have managed to make Islamic clothes work for rather than against them. On the surface they have transformed the look of Islamic dress into something more colorful and fashionable, but more importantly, they have found a way to make a socio-political statement about the role of women in post-revolutionary Iran.

Ironically, Hijab has actually provided women in Iran with the tool of resistance. They have learned to work for progressive change through the symbol of patriarchal control, and this is what inspired my "Teenager" series. Young women are using the veil to signal propriety, to signal acquiescence with patriarchal ideals of female modesty, and at the same time insisting, since they are observing the code of modesty, that they should be allowed to participate more fully in contemporary public life. After the revolution in Iran, there are more women college graduates than ever before and you see women in areas of employment and public life that would have been unheard of during the ostensibly more progressive days prior to the revolution.

As a photographer, in order to depict the lives of these young women, I had to do what they themselves have done all along—make sure they are covered, but then show how modern and up-to-date their lives are—show them as they take back social and political ground for themselves. The young women in my photographs are all properly dressed, and they are not involved in any activities, which are actually un-Islamic. And because I keep the images within the boundaries of what is deemed modest, I can question why anyone would want to take issue with what they are doing, and ask why they should not be able to enjoy the kind of innocent activities, which I depict.

Q. The Khamsa of Nizami is a romantic epic that illustrates the love affairs of legendary figures. It also inspired the most lyrical representations of women in “islamicate” Persian painting since the late eleventh century, when women were first illustrated in various decorative media. In one of your works, a group of veiled women are placed in a pool, in a scene based on the illustration Bahram Gur Observing Frolicking Women from a 1494 edition of Khamsa. In the original Khamsa page, Bahram observes the play of women in the pool with his eyes barely visible from behind the shutters of a window. In your piece, Bahram still gazes over these naked women, who are now placed in the same pool along with the veiled women of 21st-century Iran. Two young men (who unlike their female counterparts freely roam around in their bathing suits) interrupt the ideal scene that presumably once captivated Bahram. More important, the two men are also subjects of the female gaze, cast upon them from the palace of Bahram. This work not only subverts the ways in which the male gaze has traditionally operated in Persian art, but also brings to the fore the problem of Iranian women out in public, vulnerable to the male gaze.

A. I believe Bahram Gur observing frolicking women in the pool is one of the most secular miniature images available; I was actually somewhat surprised to see the depiction of the naked women in the pool from this period. But my immediate inspiration for this particular image was my own experience on the beaches in Iran. The beaches are sex segregated in Iran, however, on some of the beaches, which are more private and family oriented, the men and their male children walked, swam and played comfortably while their female counterparts had to be completely covered. So there is some contradiction there, where a supposedly religious injunction works to undermine families enjoying themselves together.

Furthermore, the gaze in public spaces is amazingly more aggressive in Middle Eastern countries despite the fact that women are more covered and their sexuality supposedly contained. Even though the women are covered head to toe, they are subject to an even more intense male gaze in Islamic countries. So I wanted to play with the whole notion of the gaze and subvert it, as you say, drawing to the surface all the contradictions inherent in the idea of how men “see” women and how women are seen in the culture at large, because women have always been objectified both in art, and in contemporary culture.

Q. In the piece Joseph Escaping from Zuleykha, an illuminated page by Bihzad from a 1488 copy of Bustan of Saadi, Zuleykha breaks the taboo as she attempts to seduce her beloved Joseph. Here we see a devious married woman who boldly expresses her passion towards a handsome young man. In your work Zuleykha has been replaced by a series of young women who probably also long for a beloved man. One girl observes a male neighbor who passes by her window. Another girl communicates (most likely with her boyfriend) over the phone. Physical interactions, however, do not come so easily. There are obstacles between the couples and all conversations are carefully controlled, through physical barriers: walls, and, most pervasively, veiling. Even in private, women are dressed according to the Iranian codes of public propriety. The veil never disappears, neither in the most intimate, all-female scenes nor in private settings where girls are shown mingling with boys. Who are these Muslim-looking deviant teenagers?

A. I believe that in most Islamic countries, whether it is Afghanistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia, the government aggressively attempts to keep males and females separate. But despite restrictions, young people still manage to talk with their boy- or girlfriend by e-mail and cell phone, or meet in secluded places where adults are not watching. The title of this piece is seduction, and I believe young men and women alike seduce one another with the looks they exchange. And that this gaze is not so one sided and aggressive because it's about mutual attraction, and not social control.

Q. Young Iranians who do not follow the regulations of the government in public are often caught and punished by the revolutionary guard. After a period of some tolerance under former president Mohammad Khatami, Iranian youth may again experience a clampdown similar to the early revolutionary years. University students, for example, have recently been urged to follow Islamic values, including detailed dress codes. Some announcements come with a warning that students who disobey these recommendations will be punished—perhaps not always physically but at least by some means. You depict this notion very vividly in one piece, where medieval religious teachers punish a group of young men (in modern western attire). What do you mean to say by this?

A. In Iran, young people today are quite defiant of strict Islamic rule; they constantly break the laws and disobey the rules even though they can be severely punished. They believe that the love of religion has to come from the heart and cannot be enforced through punishment. Moreover, nowadays you can often avoid severe punishment if your family is wealthy enough to pay a fine.

Q. Fredric Jameson once wrote, “Great political art such as that of Brecht can be taken as a pure and apolitical art; art that seems to want to be merely aesthetic and decorative can be rewritten as political with vigorous interpretation.” (1) Whether dealing with punishment, dating, or installing satellite dishes, the approach in your work remains humorous. But behind this frivolous surface there is a serious message about the politics of public and private life in Iran. Would you consider your art political?

A. I believe most art is political. Islam is a wonderful religion, but unfortunately, some people, especially the male patriarchy, have completely changed it to their liking. Young people in Iran have turned against religion because the government has forced it on them. As an artist, I just wanted to show what I have observed during many trips to Iran.

Q. Collage has allowed you to react to both past and present. You place photographic realism on imaginary landscapes of Iran’s past, projecting a phantasmagoric mood. This probably corresponds to the contradictions of the Iranian youth lifestyle, which is torn between cosmopolitanism and Islamicism. Compared to other media, what do the media of photography and collage offer you to express your ideas?

A. Photography gives me the means to capture people in their environment, distilling realistic details from everyday life, details that I then modify in the Maxiatures by way of collage. By combining these two media I am able to create new stories, which depict the everyday life of the Islamic world. A world, which is continuously in conflict between old and new values, a world that is still in color despite the fact that a metaphorical black and white has been enforced. By inserting contemporary details into historical fiction, I am creating new fictions with a basis in fact.

NOTES:
1. Jameson, Fredric. “ Is Space Political?” in Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture (New York: Routledge, 1997), 258-9.