©Shirin Neshat, The Fury 2024.

Art in the Face of Forced Silence: Witnessing Iran

January 31, 2026.

In a world where disasters keep unfolding, disasters born from our own species, though we are often ashamed to admit it, I find myself turning, again and again, toward art. Not as an escape, but as a place of reckoning. A place where looking away is no longer possible.

I remember encountering Shirin Neshat’s The Fury for the first time by coincidence, at Fotografiska in Stockholm. Later, when the exhibition travelled to Berlin, I did not hesitate for a second to return. The moment I entered her space, my body reacted before my mind could catch up: tears, goosebumps, a sudden weight in the chest. There was something deeply familiar in the way she captured women in their most naked states, not only physically, but overwhelmingly psychologically. An exposure I recognized instinctively from my own culture.

The fear held in their eyes, the tears suspended just before falling, the tense and restrained gestures of discomfort, the poems written in delicate, almost fragile handwriting, together they formed a language beyond the visual. A spiritual language. I remember a sentence written on the wall of the exhibition: “Women’s bodies as both a battleground for ideology and a source of strength.” It struck with such force because the works were naked, stripped of ornament, stripped of fiction. Naked of reality itself. You were left alone with the truth.

A truth I may have learned to ignore. Growing up, I was surrounded by stories of violence against women, rapes, murders, disappearances, and I remember hating the helplessness of simply listening. Sitting still. Absorbing these stories without knowing how to react, how to respond, how to change anything. I hated the paralysis. Perhaps that is why it became easier to look away. And perhaps this is a truth many of us avoid, simply because we have the privilege to do so.

Yet inside that small exhibition room, I did not want to escape. I wanted to stay. To observe. To face what I had been taught to silence.

One video projection remains etched into my body: a woman dancing in front of a group of men in uniform. She dances until exhaustion. Slowly, bruises begin to appear on her body. Her movement weakens as she is drained, physically, emotionally, until she finally runs into the street. There, a silent scream begins. It carries no sound, yet it is deafening. Soon, it is joined by others. A crowd forms. Objects are broken. What unfolds is not chaos, but a collective cry,for help, for dignity, for resistance.

Woman, Life, Freedom. Three simple words. Words that ignited the protests in Iran in 2022 and became a global rallying cry after the death of Mahsa Amini. A death framed as the consequence of an “absence of hijab,” when the true absence was one of humanity, ethics, and moral conscience within the Islamic Republic.

Shirin Neshat places women at the center of her work, not only to raise their voices, but to expose wounds, to bear witness, and to honor strength in all its darkness. Yet her work speaks far beyond women alone. It speaks to an entire population, one shaped by force, repression, and generational trauma. And still, resilience begins with women in Iran: shedding layers of enforced clothing, throwing imposed fabrics from their bodies, laughing loudly, dancing openly, doing something as simple, and as radical, as moving freely with sound.

Today, again and again, I feel the need to return to Neshat’s work. Sometimes it is enough to look at a single photograph, born from lived experience, carved by light and shadow, adorned with handwriting, poetry, and precise detail. These images do not decorate a wall; they confront you. They look you straight in the eyes and tell you a story. Not a fairy tale, but a real one.

Because right now, there is an entire population fighting for change in the streets of Iran. Right now, tens of thousands of people are losing their lives, driven by the hope of a different fate, a different tomorrow.

One final sentence from Neshat’s exhibition remains with me, echoing long after leaving the space:

“Anyone who knew no fear of the dark was a hero in my eyes.”

Today, those heroes are everywhere.