Three Iranian women fighting for artistic freedom
Shirin Neshat, Nazy Nazhand and Sheree Hovsepian’s friendship is seeded in their heritage — and has bloomed through their work
Victoria Woodcock
Photography by Jeff Henrikson
Hovsepian’s husband, the artist Rashid Johnson, connected the trio when he introduced his wife to Neshat. “When we met, I felt like we’d known each other for a long time,” says Neshat. Hovsepian had first encountered Neshat’s work as a photography student in Ohio. “Seeing Women of Allah totally changed my idea of what art can be and how someone like me could have a voice within the [art world],” she says.
Today, her own artwork incorporates black-and-white photography, homing in on different parts of the female form. The final collages — their disparate elements held in dramatic tension with string, nails or ceramic — were exhibited at Frieze London last year by Rachel Uffner Gallery and are currently on show in Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection in New York. “I focus a lot on the body; when I was growing up I was always hyper-aware of my physicality, my difference, of how I move through space,” she says, adding that the personal is also political. The photographs are often of her sister and their fragmented nature can be read as a comment on how women’s bodies are sites of control.
“We all carry our connection to our homeland in different ways,” says Nazhand, whose family left Iran as refugees in 1985, in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. Adds Hovsepian: “We have commiserated about how our parents suffered deep trauma as a result of leaving Iran and the life they knew. In my case, my mother’s sense of displacement deeply shaped my life.”
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