Changing the message: Parastou Forouhar’s New London Exhibition

Parastou Forouhar’s new work, Kiss Me, is about “taking back” a piece of the world that has been taken from her. For those Iranians who feel their lives are not adequately represented in today’s Iran, it's a call to view life around them as belonging to them too.

In Kiss Me, the artist, who lives and works in Germany but visits Iran at least twice a year, uses religious commemorative banners as her medium. The banners, seen in public spaces throughout Iran to mark the death of important religious figures, are a feature of everyday life, a strong statement about the religious devotion so prevalent in Iranian society. At the center of each banner are messages about “mystical devotion, spiritual love and self-sacrifice”. By taking these banners and reworking them – embroidering cut-out pieces of fabric on to them, giving the normally flat surface a texture, and adding lace, frills, or tassles – Forouhar seeks to disrupt this norm and reclaim some of the “everyday beauty” that has been monopolized by Iran’s establishment.

“It’s about changing the message,” she said, speaking at the Rose Issa Gallery in Central London, where the exhibition, her third solo show in London, is on until 28 March.

The title of the work refers to the 1953 pop song Mara Beboos (“Kiss me”) by Viguen Derderian, sometimes referred to as the “Iranian Elvis”. The artist uses pop culture – the song, the traditional banners, which have themselves become an important part of Iranian kitsch – to pull out the beauty she seeks to own. But it is also an act of nostalgia: Mara Beboos was released during Iran’s brief period of democracy under Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. For many in Iran, this song symbolises a secular Iran, and many political opposition groups claim it as their own.

Forouhar, who studied art in Germany and Tehran, has worked in a wide range of mediums over the last few years, from photography to upholstery to installations. Her digital drawings, including the Papillon collection, are among some of her most celebrated work. Upon first glance, they appear to be decorative and playful, but when viewed closely, the works display scenes of disturbing violence and torture. Much of her recent work has been an artistic, emotional response to the brutal murder of her parents in 1998, part of the Chain Killings that saw the murder of at least 80 intellectuals.

Although Forouhar is not able to show her work in Iran in any official capacity, she does organize informal exhibitions at her studio or with other artists.

Religious irreverence, regardless of the faith being scrutinised, often meets with censorship, and, in 2010, Forouhar had an unexpected brush with censors in Lebanon. A consignment of her book Art, Life and Death in Iran, which had been due to be displayed at her exhibition at Leighton House in London, was stopped by the office of Surete Generale (General Security) at Beirut-Rafic Hariri International airport. The office objected to Lollipope, a digital print produced in 2008. It features a woman in a black, flower-patterned chador licking a lollipop with the image of Pope Beendictus XVI on it. It’s a kitsch souvenir any tourist can buy in Italy, but Lebanese officials took umbrage to this overt mockery of religious devotion. They responded by gluing the page that featured Lollipope to the next page, as well as covering the woman’s face in black ink. Such defacing is often used to cover up women’s faces in Western magazines imported to parts of the Middle East, but it is rare for a book from Lebanon to be vandalized in this way.

As with Lollipope, there is great humor in Forouhar’s work. The Kiss Me banners evoke joy and playfulness. But, the artist says, “The works are not happy. They are fragile.” Her art, she says, is about the “simultaneity between brutality and beauty” and these pieces – merging tradition with pop culture, eroticism with religious fervor – are a great testament to that artistic ethos.

In 2012, Forouhar was stopped at Tehran’s airport as she tried to board a flight back to Germany. She was interrogated but later allowed to leave the country. It happens often, she admits. “Sometimes it’s friendly, sometimes it’s more aggressive,” she says. It’s a way of authorities telling people that they’re not in control of their own lives, that they’re not the ones who can make decisions about where they go or what they do. Yet, with Kiss Me, Parastou Forouhar has shown the power of reclamation, of honoring those outside of the tightly constructed world dictated by Iran’s religious and political leaders. And, she adds, the work is “not about another world, it’s about now”.