Mona Bozorgi: Threads of Freedom

December 12 - January 26, 2025

From Houston Center for Photography:

“Threads of Freedom intertwines materials and narratives in photography to question traditional representations of women in Iran. This project shares stories of Iranian women using the photographs they have taken of themselves during the recent uprising and protests in the country. At the time, photographers were prohibited from documenting the uprising, and many who tried to take photographs were arrested. So, selfies became a way to document and resist. Women photographed themselves while removing and/or burning their headscarves in public to show defiance and to reclaim the spaces that had been stolen from them for almost a half-century.

I conceived this project and its process as a form of protest, a way to resonate with the struggle. Residing outside my country and unable to participate in protests, I found myself overwhelmed and empowered by the images of young, brave women. I collected and printed their images on silk and dismantled the fabric by removing individual threads by hand. Then, I layered the images to create new compositions and to reveal and connect the stories embedded in each photograph. Throughout history, fabric was utilized to simultaneously conceal, beautify, and objectify women’s bodies. In Iran, women’s bodies and hair have been veiled with fabric for centuries. In Threads of Freedom, fabric becomes a surface that reveals women’s bodies instead of covering them, and the threads of the fabric reweave their shared stories. The work acknowledges that the people’s history will remain despite the state’s attempts to censor or erase it.

Mona Bozorgi is an artist-scholar whose interdisciplinary research and artistic practice explore the correlation between representation and performativity in photography. Bozorgi’s artistic practice is intertwined with posthuman critical theory and focuses on the materialization of bodies and how it affects the construction and production of identities. As an Iranian-born artist, her work confronts historical exclusions based on gender and provides alternative ways of understanding the contemporary self. Bozorgi’s recent work blends photography, textiles, and installation, troubles the traditional view of photographs as flat objects, and demonstrates the entanglement between the materiality of photographs and their meanings. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in the U.S. and internationally. Bozorgi is an Assistant Professor of Photography and the head of Photography and Moving Image area in the Department of Art at Florida State University.”

monabozorgi.com

@monbozorgi