Curated Capsules No.1- Women's Embodiments in Diaspora

The body has never been a neutral ground. It is the first site where power inscribes itself, where gender is regulated, where memory and violence leave their traces. For women artists in diaspora, the body becomes even more significant: at once marked by patriarchal traditions of the homeland and subject to orientalist projections in new countries, it risks being doubly erased. Yet it is precisely within this tension that many Iranian women artists reclaim embodiment as a critical site of resistance, imagination, and self-creation. Their works do not simply show the body; they re-stage it, break it apart, archive it, or turn it into language and artistic expression.  In doing so, they refuse invisibility, asserting instead the complexity of diasporic subjectivity. The practices of Sanam Khatibi, Tala Madani, Maryam Amirvaghefi, Parastou Forouhar, Niyaz Azadikhah, Arghavan Khosravi, Roksana Piroozmand, Soheila Sokhanvari, and Sara Rahmanian demonstrate how diverse artistic styles come together for one pressing purpose: to reclaim the body from imposed narratives and to articulate it as a site where memory, power, and imagination intersect.

This need for reclamation arises from the experience of displacement. To live in diaspora is to inhabit fracture: between languages, between cultural codes, between modes of recognition. For Iranian women artists, the body becomes a mobile homeland, carrying memory and cultural meanings as it crosses borders. However, this portability comes with its own challenges. Instead, the body is subjected to competing claims. In host societies, it is often reduced to simplified stereotypes, treated as a symbol rather than a subject, an object of pity or fascination. Meanwhile, the cultural traditions of the homeland impose additional expectations, burdening the diasporic body with the need for continuity and preservation. Against these pressures, artists turn to embodiment not as a fixed identity but as a contested site where new possibilities can emerge.

One sees this sharply in the satirical excess of Tala Madani’s paintings and animations, where grotesque male figures—bald, middle-aged, and often rendered in states of exposure—take center stage. These men engage in absurd rituals, leaking fluids, collapsing under their own weight, or emitting beams of light that seem at once comical and disturbing. In these scenes, slapstick humor merges with violence, and creation and destruction appear intertwined.  Madani’s images are not merely parody but pointed critique: they prompt reflection on gender, authority, and the conventions of representation itself. By making men hyper-visible in their absurdity, Madani disrupts the conventions that have historically rendered women invisible, turning the instability of male bodies into a critique of gendered power.

Parastou Forouhar, by contrast, insists on the body as archive. The loss of her parents influences her installations and performances, where repeated patterns veil hidden histories, and her own body becomes a canvas for memory. Unlike Madani’s carnivalesque grotesque, Forouhar’s approach is somber and ritualistic. Yet both artists underscore how gendered embodiment becomes inseparable from violence and power. In diaspora, Forouhar cannot return to the physical site of trauma; instead, she re-stages it through her body, ensuring that memory endures displacement. The recurring butterfly motif, inspired by her mother Parvaneh’s name, becomes a symbol of fragile endurance, turning personal loss into a visual language of remembrance. Here, the female body is both witness and testimony, refusing erasure by carrying history across borders.

Arghavan Khosravi takes a different approach by breaking the body into surreal assemblages.  Limbs float, torsos dissolve into ornamental fields, faces are obscured or split. Her figures are suspended in impossible spaces, neither complete nor destroyed. This state of in-betweenness mirrors the condition of diaspora, where identity is constantly negotiated but never resolved. For women, fragmentation resists the expectation for a coherent representation—whether as an idealized hero in national myth or as an oppressed victim in orientalist narratives. By painting women who are multiple, discontinuous, and unstable, Khosravi asserts a strong political message: these bodies cannot be reduced into a single image.

This theme of ritualized embodiment is also present in Niyaz Azadikhah’s practice, which spans photography, stitch work, painting, and animation, and is deeply rooted in community and storytelling. By working with thread, she turns a traditionally feminized and domestic material into a medium of critique, where the slowness and repetition of stitching echo the invisible cycles of reproductive and emotional labor. Her figures often appear partial or reduced to gestures, revealing how women are often recognized only through culturally accepted roles while their individuality is diminished. At the same time, the intimacy of fabric and needlework allows her to express memory in physical form, linking personal experiences to a broader context. In the diasporic context, where rituals and expectations are carried across borders, Azadikhah’s art reveals how these inherited inscriptions continually shape women’s bodies, while also revealing how they can be reinterpreted and transformed through artistic vision. Her works speak to the doubleness of diaspora, preserving memory while exposing its costs, and show how the body, even when anonymous, resists silence by asserting its presence through material traces.

Maryam Amirvaghefi expands this exploration of embodiment beyond the home into the realm of sports, using competition as a metaphor for survival and self-definition. Her work places the body within the dynamics of winning and losing, success and failure, to show how women are constantly evaluated against systems not made for them. The repetitive nature of training, the pressure to perform, and the scrutiny of onlookers parallel the demands placed on women in both art and life. In diaspora, where belonging is precarious, these sporting metaphors sharpen into questions of visibility and erasure. Amirvaghefi’s paintings and mixed-media works embody this tension, layering autobiography with broader structures of exclusion. Yet even as she navigates the uncertainty of borders and microaggressions, her practice turns sports into a form of resistance, redefining the field of play as a place where gender, ethnicity, and power are challenged.

Sanam Khatibi explores embodiment through desire, animality, and the thin line between fear and pleasure. Her figures act on impulses, living in lush, dangerous landscapes where humans and animals coexist. In these scenes, nude bodies entangle with beasts, vegetation, and each other, creating tableaux where predator and prey, cruelty and seduction, collapse into one another. Rather than reiterating orientalist fantasies of exoticized women, Khatibi’s canvases confront power in its most primal registers—domination, submission, excess, and loss of control. The erotic here is unstable: never wholly liberatory, never wholly oppressive, but charged with ambiguity. By drawing on art-historical references as wide-ranging as the Bayeux Tapestry, pre-Columbian imagery, Bosch, and Kahlo, she re-situates the female body within symbolic systems that are both mythic and contemporary. In diaspora, these pieces challenge the moral codes of the homeland and the voyeuristic expectations of the hostland, presenting the female body as wild, contradictory, and ungovernable.

Roksana Pirouzmand treats the body as both material and collaborator, creating installations and sculptural objects that move in relation to her own presence. By using delicate materials like clay and water, she reflects on the instability of diasporic memory and how family connections change over distance. Her works often involve casts of her body or those of her mother and grandmother, binding her practice to a lineage of women and to the transmission of memory through generations. Care and violence emerge together in these pieces, demonstrating how intimacy is never free from rupture. Rather than seeking permanence, Pirouzmand embraces deterioration and transformation, presenting embodiment as fragile yet persistent, a memorial form that resists erasure through its inherent vulnerability.

Soheila Sokhanvari approaches the female body through the delicate surface of miniature painting, layering traditional forms with subversive feminist imagery. Her portraits of pre-revolutionary Iranian women—singers, actresses, cultural figures once erased from public memory—are rendered in jewel-like detail on vellum, their presence reclaimed with a quiet intensity. The fragility of the miniature form mirrors the precariousness of women’s visibility, while the brilliance of her palette insists on their resilience. By drawing on Iranian artistic traditions while working within a diasporic frame, Sokhanvari reclaims bodies that history sought to suppress, recasting them as icons of survival and agency. In her work, the body is not only represented but also memorialized, made luminous in its defiance of erasure.

Sara Rahmanian draws inspiration from architecture to reimagine the body as a home for memory, doing so by transforming everyday objects. By painting on materials like coffee filters or rendering ordinary forms from unusual perspectives, she transforms the banal into thresholds and walls, spaces that feel both fragile and temporary. Her work suggests that displacement is not only geographic but also perceptual, reshaping how the world is seen and inhabited. For women, this architectural metaphor resonates deeply: bodies are treated as containers of culture and continuity, yet in diaspora they become porous and unsettled. Rahmanian’s art captures this tension, revealing the body as structure under strain, holding histories it can no longer fully embrace.

Together, these practices do not create a single style or movement. They span satire and ritual, surrealism and domesticity. Yet this diversity is precisely the point, the female body in diaspora is not a single image to be reclaimed, but a contested terrain constantly being renegotiated. Whether rendered grotesque, fragmented, ritualized, domestic, or structural, the body becomes the ground on which visibility is fought for. These artists show that diaspora intensifies the urgency of this struggle: when women risk being erased both from the narratives of the homeland and the projections of the hostland, art becomes a mode of survival.
To attend to these works is to see embodiment not as the end point of identity but as its creative ground. In their art, Iranian women in diaspora reclaim the body not as a fixed identity but as a space of possibility, one that resists erasure by insisting on multiplicity, ambivalence, and transformation. Their practices remind us that the politics of representation is not only about visibility, but about refiguring what it means to be embodied at all in the fractured experiences of diaspora.

Sources: 

• www.artchart.net
• www.centrepompidou.fr
• www.palaisdetokyo.com
• www.imagomundicollection.org
• www.macba.cat

Cover and Slider Image:

• pilarcorrias.com