Shirin Aliabadi, Iranian Artist With a Focus on Women, Dies at 45
Shirin Aliabadi, an Iranian artist who gave expression to Iranian women navigating between their youthful, rebellious energy and the strictures of the Islamic Republic, died on Oct. 1 in Tehran. She was 45.
The cause was cancer, according to her husband, the artist Farhad Moshiri.
Ms. Aliabadi’s best-known pieces were the photographic series “Girls in Cars” (2005) and “Miss Hybrid” (2008). Each one illuminated how young Iranian women adapted mandatory codes of dress and behavior to reflect their own individuality rather than be confined by them. In their hands, the traditional hijab, or head scarf, was not a dark shroud but a colorful fashion accessory.
“Miss Hybrid” shows various women wearing their hijabs but also revealing bleached blonde hair, a bandaged nose (a sign of plastic surgery, which in Iran is a status symbol), fake tans, earbuds or bubble gum.
“Girls in Cars” depicts the subjects riding around at night and ready to party.
“I was stuck in traffic one weekend in a pretty posh part of Tehran,” Ms. Aliabadi said in a 2013 article for Deutsche Bank, where her works were on exhibit. “We were surrounded by beautiful girls made up to go to a party or just cruising in their cars, and I thought then that this image of women chained by tradition and the hijab is not even close to reality here.”
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Ms. Aliabadi was taken with this “Grease”-like scene, of the girls listening to music and talking to boys, in part because it ran counter to the stereotypical Western view of Iran, which often focuses on the many constraints on women.
“She wanted to show a Tehran that the Western media doesn’t show,” Mr. Moshiri said by email. “Tehran wasn’t just the black chador.”
The protagonists in her art suggest that even in Iran a woman could express her personality and urbanity, if in a slightly subversive manner.
“I don’t believe that you automatically become a rebel with a Hermès scarf around your neck,” she said, but, she added, fashionable apparel can show the paradoxes with which modern Iranian women live, and allow them to convey “a passive rebellion.”
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Ultimately, however, “these young women’s concern is not to overthrow the government but to have fun,” she said.
Ms. Aliabadi was represented for more than a decade by The Third Line, a Dubai-based art gallery. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam in Paris, the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery in England and the Chelsea Art Museum in New York. It is also in public and private collections, including those of the Farjam Foundation in Dubai and the Deutsche Bank in Germany.
“A wry, witty sensibility is threaded through all of her art,” Shiva Balaghi, a cultural historian who specializes in contemporary Middle Eastern art and who is based in Los Angeles, said in a phone interview.
“On the one hand, Iranian women must abide by restrictions imposed by official decrees of the state and imposed by the morality police,” she said. “On the other hand, Western media can fixate on the veil, reducing it to the defining symbol of gender identity. Aliabadi’s playful portraits show how Iranian women navigate these two spheres.”
Shirin Aliabadi was born on March 10, 1973, in Tehran. Her mother, Maymanat, is an artist who taught at Tehran University. Her father, Iraj, was a poet who made his living by working for an insurance company. Her older brother, Ramin, mentored her in music, books and pop culture. Along with her husband, her mother and brother survive her.
Ms. Aliabadi grew up in a vibrant household surrounded by artists and intellectuals, Mr. Moshiri said, and the family enjoyed a high standard of living until the Iranian revolution in 1979.
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At that point her parents lost their jobs, he said, but they still had the means to send her later to study archaeology at the University of Paris, where she also earned a master’s degree in art history. She had hoped to participate in excavations of the ancient Iranian civilization of Elam, but the Gulf War and other conflicts interfered.
She married Mr. Moshiri in 1993. The two shared a creative impulse and began making art together.
“We just started making things — lamps, chairs, design objects,” he said. “We’d buy broken old furniture and fix them up. Gradually we started to sell.”
They deliberately avoided subject matter that could get them into trouble with the authorities, he said, such as nudity and anti-religious themes.
“We wanted to find a language that allowed us to say something without having to shout, and that really became the focal point of our creativity,” said Mr. Moshiri, whose work was exhibited a year ago at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
One of their collaborations was “Operation Supermarket,” a series of large photographs of everyday household goods whose packages they had rebranded with sardonic messages to mock consumerism and capitalism. The packaging for a pair of Toblerone chocolate bars, for example, retained their distinctive red and yellow coloring, but the letters spelled out “Tolerating Intolerance.” The series was shown at the 2008 Singapore Biennale.
What set Ms. Aliabadi apart, said Dr. Balaghi, the cultural historian, was her blending of the playful and the political.
“Although she made art in Iran and about Iran, her art spoke to more universal issues — about gendered representation, about the politics of the everyday, about urban life, about the beauty industry and consumerism,” she said. “And about tolerance.”
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Shirin Aliabadi (b. March 10, 1973, Tehran, Iran – d, October 1, 2018, Tehran, Iran) was an Iranian contemporary visual artist.
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Shirin Aliabadi (b. March 10, 1973, Tehran, Iran – d, October 1, 2018, Tehran, Iran) was an Iranian contemporary visual artist.
Aliabadi was born in Tehran, Iran in 1973. She studied art history and archaeology at the University of Paris.
Aliabadi was married to the artist Farhad Moshiri. She was represented by The Third Line gallery in Dubai.
Aliabadi died on October 1, 2018, from cancer, in Tehran, Iran.
Aliabadi's art, which includes photographs and drawings, explores the competing effects on young urban Iranian women of traditional values, religious restrictions and globalized western culture. Her work appeared in solo exhibitions in Dubai, Tehran, London, Switzerland and Denmark and in group exhibitions at the Institut des cultures d'Islam in Paris, the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, at Frieze New York, at the Chelsea Art Museum, and in Monaco, Rio de Janeiro, Copenhagen, Italy, Norway, Estonia, Germany, Switzerland and Spain.
Her work is held in the collections of Deutsche Bank AG in Gerrnany, the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery and the Farjam Collection in Dubai.
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