Shirin Fathi

Disobedient Bodies, New Deli 2022

A beauty culture with rigid standards has been a source of great pain and hopelessness for many people.

Working across a variety of media including photography, installation, stitch-work textiles, video, animation and performance, this exhibition brought together artists who focused on conceptions of beauty while exploring issues of anxiety, sexual identity, obsession and transformation in relation to gender, ethnicity, nationality and race. The exhibition featured works by Tahmineh Monzavi, Niyaz Azadikhah, Zuhra Hilal and Moshtari Hilal.

Zuhra Hilal looked at the objectification of the female body through textile. In An Exploration of the Nameless Anatomy (2015), Hilal demanded a deeper analysis of the female body through performance.

In her series Tina (2010–2012), Tahmineh Monzavi documented the life of a transgender woman in Tehran.

In Structure (2020), Moshtari Hilal investigated ways in which she could decolonise Western beauty standards imposed on her as an Afghan woman living in Europe.

In Salasat (2020), Niyaz Azadikhah took inspiration from personal stories and everyday encounters with people. Using stitch-work textiles and animation, Azadikhah explored the untranslatable nature of human emotion, seeing her textiles as bodies that incorporated the emotions and memories of their narrators.

This project was part of CISA 2021: This Will Keep You Warm, with Khoj International Artists’ Association and Goethe-Institut.