The Silent Mirror (Portrait of Forough Farrokhzah)
Soheila Sokhanvari creates portrait paintings of Iranian women that explore how women operated in society before and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In her small-scale paintings she employs traditional Persian miniature techniques such as painting on calf velum with grounded pigments, a process she learnt from her father. Depicted here is Forough Farrokhzad, one of Iran’s greatest modernist writers, whose poetry often dealt with the subject of female desire. Shortly before she was born in 1934 the pro-Western Iranian king, Reza Shah, passed a law to remove the veil and permitted women access to education. In this painting we see Forough, looking at her younger self, unveiled and reflected in a mirror. In her painstaking portraits Soheila sees herself reflected, ‘I am in all my paintings’ she explains, the stories of the women she paints chimes with her own experience of leaving for the UK in 1978 when only 14 years old. After the Islamic Revolution, Forough’s poetry was banned for over a decade and many extracts remain censored to this day.
