'Don't let the protests fade away': The Iranian-Canadian artists showing solidarity with women in Iran

On September 16 in Tehran, a 22-year old woman, Mahsa Amini — also known by her Kurdish name Jina Amini — died after being taken into police custody for violating Iranian morality laws. She was accused of wearing her hijab "improperly." 

According to eyewitness accounts, Amini was severely beaten by police officers. Her death sparked a series of record-breaking protests in Iran that are still ongoing nearly two months later. 

For the Toronto-based Iranian-Canadian artist and filmmaker Hajar Moradi, news of Amini's death and the protests came to her quickly through Farsi-language Twitter. Moved to action, Moradi helped arrange a demonstration at Queen's Park just three days after Amini's death, in solidarity with the Iranian protestors. Moradi was inspired by three videos of Iranian women cutting their hair circulating on social media. 

"So many people joined us [in Queen's Park]," Moradi says — estimating a total of around 150 people. "Some people joined us in cutting their hair. It was a very emotional moment; everyone around us started crying."

In her art, which includes everything from painting to sculpture to animation, Moradi explores questions of identity, resilience, feminism and gender. For the Queen's Park protest, she designed a poster using the protest slogan "Say Her Name" — a call-and-response chant answered with "Mahsa Amnini" — inviting the community to join her and her friends in cutting their hair in protest against Iran's government and its mandatory hijab laws.

"Artists try to visualize people's demand and turn it into a medium that's relatable to everyone," she says. 

For decades, Iranians — especially women, ethnic minorities and the queer community — have had their human rights seriously curtailed under the Iranian government's strict Islamist regime. While there have been cycles of political resistance movements throughout Iran's recent history, the current one is widely considered to be one of the most significant protests in Iran since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979 — women-led or otherwise — with thousands pouring into the streets in provinces across Iran, including schoolchildren. 

The diaspora has shown up in solidarity; in Berlin, 80,000 Iranians and supporters marched the streets — the largest gathering in history of Iranians against the Islamic Republic of Iran. For many Iranian diaspora artists, showing solidarity through their art is one of the most meaningful ways to feel connected to the protest movement. As an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, Moradi feels obligated to use her work as a voice in the face of injustice. Since Iran's Green Movement protests in 2009, demanding the removal of a former president following a rigged election, Moradi has been politically active through her art.

"I am an artist and my weapon is my art," she says. "I think art offers powerful opportunities to express our common humanity; [it] carries the social and political demands of its own people. If done right, it can change society." 

Art that tells the stories of women arrested by the regime

Before the Mahsa Amini protests started, Toronto and Montreal-based Iranian artist and filmmaker Rojin Shafiei was gearing up for Toronto's Nuit Blanche, a city-wide arts exhibit. Just two weeks before the exhibit's October 1st launch date, Mahsa Amini's death hit the headlines and protests swept across Iran. 

"I told my curator, I cannot stand beside a piece and talk about something that is not about the recent protests in Iran — I feel horrible," Shafiei says. She adds that this was a personal choice, and not a judgment on any artist who might have chosen differently to her.

Shafiei put together a new audio-visual exhibit, gathering cell-phone footage from protests in Iran sent to her by her friends. "I got a story from a trans woman, a disabled woman, a university student, a mother," she says. "All those stories are about people who have been arrested so far." 

Along with clips from the news, Shafiei wove those videos between footage of herself cutting her hair. "With every single hair that I cut, I brought the name of one of the people that was killed during the protests in Iran."

It was an intense process: Shafiei was working on the exhibit mere hours before her showing. "All I wanted to show through that work was 1 per cent of the challenges that people, especially woman and queer people, are going through in Iran," she says.

On October 1st, the date of Nuit Blanche, 50,000 people attended a solidarity in Richmond Hill near Toronto. Rallies took place in 150 cities around the world, and in Iran, university students took their protests to the streets, in the face of violent clashes with authorities.

Art that amplifies the voices of Iranians, for Iranians

For Golshan Abdmoulaie — an Iranian, Toronto-based writer, poet, photographer and filmmaker — the most important thing right now is amplifying the voices of Iranian people in Iran, as well as emphasizing the fact that the experience of Islam is completely different in Iran than outside. 

"An Iranian person living in Canada or in the U.S. is going to experience being the 'other' as a Muslim subject, whereas in Iran, they don't have that same otherness — the Islamic clergy is the ruling class," Abdmoulaie says. In summary: supporting the fall of Iran's regime does not make you Islamophobic. 

She shares a photograph that she took of her grandmother during her last trip to Iran; her grandmother is sitting on a stool, having her hair dyed. "It's important for me to make art about Iran that's outside of the Western or white gaze — outside of what they expect Iran to look like," Abdmoulaie says. 

While the photo was taken in 2019 — three years before the Mahsa Amini protests — its message is as true today as it was then.

"She hated the regime so much," Abdmoulaie says of her grandmother. "When she was younger, she would write with lipliner on the streets, 'death to the Islamic regime.' She's definitely my idol, and someone that I think would be really, really, really happy to see [the protests] going on right now, in particular schoolgirls [taking part]."

Most recently, Abdmoulaie co-wrote the film This Place alongside Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs: a queer love story about two young women, one Iranian and Kanienʼkehá:ka, the other Tamil. Directed by V.T. Nayani, the film was recently screened at TIFF.

Art that reflects the Iranian immigrant experience

For Abdmoulaie, Shafiei and Moradi, the shared experience of immigration impacts how their art interacts with the protests in Iran. 

Abdmoulaie came to Canada as a political refugee with her parents in the early 1990s. "My relationship with Iran has really informed the way that I was raised and how I see the world," she says.

It's the same for Shafiei. In her personal life, Shafiei has jumped between living in Iran and Canada. At the age of 18, she left her parents in Canada and moved back to Iran, staying there for a few years. "[I said to my parents], 'I want to be an artist and I don't want to give up on my country,'" Shafiei recalls.

Permanently moving to Canada was no easy adjustment. "I wasn't really happy about my immigration process; it was so hard for me in all aspects, I couldn't really adapt myself in Canada," she says. Then, she began to unpack those feelings through her artwork. "Always, always, always my art is about how I react to what is happening in Iran."

Recently, Shafiei won a prize at a film festival in Italy. She says that any recognition she gets for her artwork isn't about her. "It's for the [Iranian] people, because all the inspiration that we get is from the pain that they go through," she says. "This pain is 43 years old — it's not a joke."

Shafiei adds that she was recently speaking to an artist friend, Shiva Khosravi, based in Switzerland. Six years ago, Khosravi created a piece around the fact that women in Iran can be arrested for showing their hair in public. Khosravi told Shafiei that, back then, her peers had laughed at her, telling her that she was exaggerating. "Now, people can see that all those things that we were showing in our art — it's not an exaggeration, it's the reality of life," Shafiei says.

Moradi immigrated twice in her life: once, at the age of one, moving from southern Iran to Tehran at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war. Then, in her 20s, she moved to Canada. In fact, her name was taken from the Arabic verb "hajara," which means "to emigrate." 

"My great-grandparents were Bakhtiari nomads, always moving between the mountains and the valleys in southwest Iran," Moradi says. "Similar to my ancestors, being displaced and on the move has immensely shaped the story of my life as a woman and as an artist." 

She hopes that women will see the protests happening in Iran and in the diaspora, and get inspired. "I would love non-Iranian women to get inspired from this movement, and try to echo the voice of the Iranian people," she says. "Don't let the news fade away — don't let the protests fade away."