When tackling the issue of the body, a great bunch of our contemporary visual artworks reduce the struggle between the body and the law to the image of a feminine figure in hijab in a too straight-forward, uncritical manner; a figure which almost always urges the audience to acknowledge the image or, in effect, purchase it through ornate glitz and a gesture which is seductive, sultry, innocent and curious all at once. Such is the artifice of formulaic imaginary pornographic narratives about a fiend in veiling, an authoritative view of the body, desirable for customers of easy-to-digest artworks.
In contrast to such unrealistic, warped, market-oriented images, many of our artists propose a more profound insight: body is a mundane condition, dominated by objective forces. These forces leave traces of their mastery over the body, not mysteriously, but in a strictly tangible, material way. In the works of these artists, suffering goes beyond formulaic signs such as a face under the veil. Instead of displaying the triumphant ready-made scene of suffering or suppression, the artist recreates it in the process of creating the artwork. The work of Shaya Shahrestani is exemplary of this insight. In these large-scale expansive pictures, she expresses the conflict with the outside forces and the resulting suffering by deforming the figure through using charcoal on patterned surface. By particularly emphasizing the practice of drawing, she makes visible the action-oriented aspect of the picture and also the agency of the artist. Thus, these drawings are not an embellished expression of suffering and distress under the authoritative gaze of an image-maker who absolves herself from the crime, but a field to perform suffering and domination on the one hand and the act of confrontation and resistance on the other.

Ali Golestaneh
October 2020
(Translated by Parisa Hakim Javadi)