Listen to the Voices of a Feminist Revolution in Iran

A collective installation by The Margate School in solidarity with the recent uprisings in Iran.

On 16 September, Mahsa (Zhina) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, was brutally murdered by the morality police of the Islamic Republic of Iran. She was beaten several times on the head after her arrest for wearing so-called ‘improper’ hijab.

Written in an open letter ‘Listen to the Voices of a Feminist Revolution in Iran’ by a group of Iranian feminists in Western academia:

“The broader academic and activist community around the world is still largely silent about what is happening in Iran. The Iranian crisis has been clamped between two reductive though hegemonic frameworks that are operative in the media as well as in academia. On the one hand, the long history of colonial oppression intertwined with the recent rise in xenophobic, racist, and anti-gender discourses in the West has reduced multi-faceted issues, such as the hijab, to “cultural issues”. Particularly, it has hindered progressive voices in the Global North from taking a full stance of solidarity with the struggles of people in the Middle East and other Muslim-majority countries out of fear of feeding into the anti-gender ideologies in the West. On the other hand, a so-called progressive but neo-orientalist approach has ignored the fates and subjectivities of those not located in Western contexts, especially those from the MENA region. These frameworks have led to an epistemic and political dismissal of Iranian feminist and queer resistances. Their multi-layered oppression and struggles remain unrecognized, and they are rendered invisible unless they link their struggles to Western issues or see themselves through that neo-orientalist gaze.”

We invite the public to engage with the installation by recording a message in solidarity with the movement onto fabric that will be supplied by The Margate School. Your message will then be pinned to the banners in The Margate School gallery space.

The Margate School / Gallery Space

8th – 13th November, 10am – 4pm