We invite you to participate in
AN ATTEMPT AT CONTEXTUALIZING IMAGES OF A REVOLUTION
Sunday, November 20, 2022
A choir will open the evening, singing the Revolution song “Barpaakhiz Baraaye ’Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” *
5 pm sharp
Three school kids walking firmly down the alley together, two waving their removed hijabs up and down with tenacity and all three chanting Zan Zendegi Azadi (woman life freedom). Someone recorded this moment and shared it online, shortly after it was widely spread in Iranian social media.
At that point, these kids were the youngest school girls we witnessed taking their fight to the streets. Under islamic republic’s rule, school girls in Iran are forced to wear Hijab from the age of 7. In an environment where the islamic republic’s ideologies, religious teachings and rules are at the center of the educational system and are enforced on the minds and bodies of these kids, such an “image”, while showing the depth of the intergenerational suffering of Iranian women and girls living under the rule of the gender apartheid called islamic republic, is a testimony to how impressive these acts of resistance portray the liberation promise encapsulated in the slogan ‘women, life, freedom’.
This is one of the many images that were documented and spread among people. As the Revolution began in Iran, due to the state’s propaganda and censorship, and inaccessibility to independent and international news agencies and report mechanisms, every person became a Citizen Journalist. Through documenting every second of the revolution and gathering evidence of the crimes committed by the islamic republic, the people of Iran have been forming individual and independent archives and news outlets. Sharing them among each other, they inform and educate themselves of what is going on.
Archiving, documenting and spreading truthful images and fighting dis-information became acts of resistance, amplifying the fight at the frontline of the Revolution.
The beginning of revolutionary protests in Iran coincided with a journey into the depths of images and words. The images that have been circulating since the murder of Jina (Mahsa) Amini until today are the most naked evidence of the crimes of the islamic republic and the resistance of Iranian people against this brutal regime.
Sunday’s program is an attempt to prevent these images from becoming isolated icons.
By showing them in their context and in connection with each other, addressing the situation they portray, we hope to open up a deeper discussion about the Revolution in Iran, one that is not reductive and does not exoticize.
Like the Revolution itself, this program and its hopes, promises and contents are ongoing.
This event is put together by a group of artists that assembled to take action due to the current situation in Iran.
*
The piece “Barpaakhiz Baraaye ‘Zan Zendegi Azadi” (rise up for woman life freedom), also known as ‘the freedom song’, was created by a group of Iranian musicians (we don’t know their names) and was performed by the students of the University of Art in Tehran the next day. The place where the piece is performed is the ground floor of the music faculty, where music performances and even student performances have been banned recently. The following days of the performance, the students also were banned from entering the University or from taking part in exams, even from graduating.
The melody is based on the theme of the song “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido”, composed by Chilean protest singer and activist Víctor Jara in 1974, and was used and rearranged for the Iranian Revolution of 1979, going by the title ‘Barpaakhiz’.
“What the students of the music departments at the University of Art have created is impressive in that the piece is not a product, it is not created to capitalize. It is not seasonal cause its creators are all the oppressed, it fights copy-right, as it lacks the name of the singer, composer and producer. It does not even have a face, it is a piece from a group, nameless faceless on behalf of the nameless faceless freedom fighters.”
