Photographer Haleh Anvari: More than meets
the eye
Haleh Anvari talks
to Natalie Hanman about how her photographs of
women in brightly coloured chadors attempt to
redraw the image of Iran
in the west
·
The future's
bright? ... A woman in Dubai,
photographed by Haleh Anvari
Haleh Anvari is
thirsty for something sweet. As she sits down in a small, crowded cafe within
walking distance of the Barbican in London,
where she will be performing this weekend, the Iranian photographer and
writer looks at me with tired eyes and says she needs a sugar rush, before
promptly ordering a can of Coke.
Anvari's performance, Power of a Cliché, is in
part inspired by a hunger for colour and energy –
something easier on the eye than the black chador that, she argues, has
become reductive visual shorthand for Iran in the west.
"The black chador is such
an unforgiving garment," Anvari says, in
between sips of her fizzy drink. "Even when you photograph it, it has no
nuances: there is no shade, no light play. It's just solid, static."
Instead, Anvari explores colour,
sound and movement in her work – a collage of photographs accompanied by a
spoken-word performance – because these are the things, she says, "that
people really don't associate with Iranian women. The chador effectively
obliterates any notion of them".
Indeed what Anvari's project is keen to convey is
that unlike the dominant image projected in the west, the country is not
composed only of women in black. On a recent trip to Iran, I saw first-hand
how young women in the cities of Tehran, Isfahan
and Shiraz challenged the rules of the hijab,
wearing colourful, sometimes designer, headscarves
pushed back to reveal dyed and coiffed hairstyles, their faces painted with
bright makeup, and long coats belted tightly around their waists. In other
places like the desert city of Yazd, where the clergy have a much
stronger grip, the black chador was much more widespread.
Anvari, a Shia
Muslim, was born in Tehran
46 years ago. Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, she was sent to a Church
of England boarding school in south-west England – a common trend among wealthier
Iranian families – and went on to study politics and philosophy at Keele University in Staffordshire. She returned to Iran in 1992,
where she met her husband, and began working as a translator and fixer for
foreign journalists.
The intervening years had been
hard on the country. The revolution, initially
supported by many – including Anvari's father, a
journalist who was imprisoned in the Shah's time – quickly turned violent and
bloody. It was followed by eight long years of war with Iraq in which
hundreds of thousands of Iranians died.
"It was quite scary when I
first went back," she says. "The place was so changed visually. The
revolution had stripped the country of its colour
and the war had broken its back."
With the revolution came the hijab, which was made compulsory dress for all women
whenever they were in public. The black chador was not itself a legal
requirement, but there was great pressure in certain provinces and contexts
for women to wear it. "There was a lot of propaganda saying this is the
preferred hijab, the better hijab,
and effectively they created a form of prejudice against you in certain
arenas if you didn't wear the black chador – they wouldn't let you in,"
says Anvari.
Growing up in what she calls
"a chadori family", where women wore the
chador "to enter the world, not to shy from it", Anvari treats the practise with
a certain respect; in this, she recalls academics such as Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu-Lughod,
who have argued for the important, complex and contextual meanings of the
veil in face of its frequent critique by western feminists.
What is key
for Anvari, however, is that her aunt and her
grandmother did not drape themselves in black but, instead, always wore colourful chadors. "In Islam, they say that women
should have an eye on decency," says Anvari,
"but I don't see why, first, decency has to be exclusive to the female
of the population and, second, why it has to be black."
Anvari also allows for the fact that many
women subvert the hijab. "There is a school of
thought that the only effective resistance to the Islamic Republic in the
past 30 years has been the way women have pushed the boundaries of their hijab and managed to maintain some sort of
individuality," she says.
"Iranians are famous for
having a dual life – our outside and our inside life. Our architecture
manifests it, our language manifests it." She points to the houses in Kashan, which include an inner sanctum "where things
really go on" and an outer sanctum, where you receive strangers. As she
opens her laptop to show me photographs from an exhibition of Iranian art in London, she explains that the idea of a
public/private divide is central to her own work, in which she protests
against how such complexity is eroded in western representations.
In Iran, Anvari
believes women "share the same problems, and have the same issues to
deal with as women, together", whether they wear a chador or not –
including unjust laws on divorce, child custody, inheritance and the right to
travel. Yet both the Islamic Republic and the west seem to be working to
forge a split between them.
"I realised
this sense of being separated from the chadori
women," she says, "who I grew up with and who were very kind to me
... This was also mingled with the fact that I worked for six years with
foreign journalists and no matter what story they did, the visuals were
always an Iranian women [in a black chador]. They would write about the
economy, politics, Iranian caviar or the price of petrol and the accompanying
photograph was always a picture of an Iranian woman in a black chador. And
this image makes everyone think that you're very downtrodden and
oppressed."
Representing Iranian women
without resistance, without agency, is not only to deny them the strength and
humour with which they have faced the
"dreadful things that have happened to them as mothers and
sisters", Anvari argues, it also has grave
political implications.
"One of the things I felt
I needed to do this for was because both in Afghanistan and Iraq, the
Americans used the pretext of women and their plight to justify attacking
these two countries against international law," says Anvari.
"But I'd rather wear the hijab and live a
quiet life without nuclear fallout. I don't want to be bombed. It's a
difficult thing to explain … How many revolutions can a people have in 30
years?"
It was in 2004 that Anvari took her first photographs of women in colourful chadors, which in the Power of a Cliché are set
against those "anonymous monolithic tower[s] of blackness", as Anvari calls the chadors in her talk. The bright, kinetic
shapes of women in orange, green, red and blue are set against the barren,
desert landscape, or the bulging domes and towering minarets of majestic
mosques. These are then set against other icons more familiar to the west –
Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, Madonna – which in turn are interspersed
with western representations of Iran, the veiled faces of women
staring out from magazine and book covers.
Libby Purves
nicely captured the tone of the performance this week when she described it,
on BBC Radio 4, as "poetically angry". It opens with Anvari's strong, compelling voice laying claim to her
intersectional identities – "I am Haleh, I am
Iranian, I am a woman, I am a liberal" – and
takes well-aimed swipes at the western gaze from "visitors on a 10-day
visa and with a 10-foot lens".
Anvari, a self-taught photographer, feels
herself to be part of a growing core of Iranian female photographers,
including Hana Mirijanian,
Bita Reyhani, Raana Javadi and Ghazaleh Hedayat, dealing with
issues of identity and location. "We have to find ways of showing you
ourselves and our lives, without showing too much and without offending the
authorities, which makes life very exciting and colourful,"
she says.
Her own location makes her
particularly suited to deconstructing such transnational issues of
representation. "I feel I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place,"
she says. "In one country that I call home, they want to cover me up,
and in the other country that I call home, they want to strip me down … A lot
of young women in Iran have become so obsessed with their face and their
bodies but when you say to them, 'Why are you doing this?' there is a part of
you that also thinks … it becomes a form of resistance."
· Power of a
Cliché by Haleh Anvari
is at the Barbican, London
on December 7 at 3pm
|
