By Lian Benasuly
A public art projection featuring 30 artworks by anonymous international artists was projected onto UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design, & Architecture Museum earlier this week, as a gesture of solidarity with the struggle for women’s equality in Iran. Protests against systemic gender discrimination have spread around the globe since the tragic death of Jina Mahsa Amini in September 2022, after being arrested for violating Iran’s laws on hijab, the head covering worn by some Muslim women.
“We chose to project art onto buildings because we wanted this to be a public art project, but we were also pointing to the ellipses, the silences, the lack of solidarity from cultural and educational institutions for the women in Iran and their struggle for freedom,” said Shiva Balaghi, a cultural historian who specializes in the Middle East. Balaghi is academic coordinator of the UCSB Area Global Initiative.
UCSB Arts & Lectures organized the projection as part of its Justice for All series in partnership with UCSB’s Department of Art, Area Global Initiative, Art, Design & Architecture Museum, Center for Middle East Studies, Feminist Futures Initiative, Iranian Studies Initiative, and the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
The 30 artworks ran in a loop for the duration of the three-hour projection accompanied musically by the Woman, Life, Freedom movement’s chosen anthem, “Baraye,” which translates to “Because” by Iranian singer-songwriter Shervin Hajipour..
When Balaghi first heard of the women-led protest movement in Iran, she listened obsessively to the news to get every bit of information she could.
“I then started to think: What can I do?” she said. “I could write an op-ed or be a talking head, but that didn’t feel right to me. That’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to do something in community, I wanted to do something collaborative, and I wanted to do something that was in solidarity with the protesters in Iran.”
Balaghi reached out to her colleagues at Mozaik, an environmental justice and social nonprofit Los Angeles , and ArtRise Collective, a nonprofit that organizes public art projects for the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, to bring this public art project to life.
Mozaik launched an invitation to artists around the world to submit their art in October 2022, in preparation for this public art project, and received hundreds of submissions. Balaghi and two other Iranian women sat on a committee to choose which artworks to include in the projection.
Dozens of students, faculty and community members came to campus at 8 p.m. on Tuesday to view the Woman. Life. Freedom. art projection that was organized by UCSB cultural historian Shiva Balaghi and UCSB Arts & Lectures.
“The artists very much drew their inspiration from the protesters. The form, the content, and the subjects were very much inspired and taken from the protesters themselves. In a way that art now stands as a virtual archive of the early months of the protest,” Balaghi said.
For Balaghi, choosing art as a medium for solidarity with Iranian women in Iran and in the diaspora felt right.
“Making art isn’t just reporting what’s happening or expressing the artist’s views on what’s happening socially,” Balaghi said. “Making art and disseminating it actually creates new language, new ways of thinking, new spaces in society.”
Lian Benasuly is a fourth-year student at UC Santa Barbara studying Communication and minoring in Professional Writing in the Journalism track. She is also a web and social media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.