Bloody Testaments to Female Resilience

by David M. Roth

We see a lot in the news these days about Iran, none of it good.  From proxy wars to domestic political repression to clandestine nuclear weapons programs, it’s a succession of bleak images.  Shiva Ahmadi, an Iranian émigré, doesn’t alter that composite picture, but she offers something of a counternarrative, reminding us of the myriad ways beauty and terror can collide and intermingle.  She does so by calling on the venerable tradition of Persian and Indian miniatures, an idiom in which all-powerful (male) potentates exercise power, mediating between war and peace, good and evil.  Strands of Resilience, the artist’s first mid-career museum show, organized by Manetti Shrem Associate Curator Susie Kantor, nods to that tradition from a decidedly female perspective using the realities of Iran’s current malaise as conceptual ballast. 

The exhibition consists primarily of watercolors (all 2023) executed at sizes substantially larger than traditional miniatures, ranging from 22 x 15 to 60 x 41 inches.  They show women rendered in supersaturated colors floating in space, their hair waving in serpentine gestures, their naked bodies garlanded by blossoms and surrounded by foliage, fish, snakes and other animals.  They appear to be frolicking in a prelapsarian state of shape-shifting freedom and mobility.  But are they?  Look closely and you see that their bodies are bruised and blood-stained, painted with such an eye-catching mix of precision and let-loose abandon, it’s hard to believe they are as damaged as they portend to be.  Such is the seduce-and-clobber character of the artist’s oeuvre, which, to date, has included video animations (based on similar imagery) and sculptures that re-create homemade bombs designed to inflict maximum carnage. 

Ahmadi, who’s taught at UCD Davis since 2015, knows these things from experience.  “My life was hugely affected by the uncertainty and instability brought by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the subsequent eight-year Iran-Iraq war,” she explained in a 2020 Bomb interview.  “During the war, we experienced city bombings for a period of time.  As a child, I was terrified of the sound of an explosion and the unknowns that came with it.  One day, my mom told me that if I hid underneath the big, sturdy, German-made table in the kitchen, I would be fine even if a bomb dropped on our house!  I believed her!  After that, anytime I heard helicopters, I would grab a book and hide under the table.” One of them, she recounted, was George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  “What I loved most was the allegory and how the message was hidden and wrapped in layers and conveyed through animals.”

Snakes, an always-contested mythological symbol, figure prominently.  In Felinity, one of the exhibition’s most potent works, the artist casts them as emblems of fertility, with serpents emerging umbilically from a squatting woman’s navel.  Over her head, she hoists what looks to be a spotted leopard.  A peaceable kingdom?  Not exactly.  It’s a body — horribly brutalized yet very much alive.  Looking at it, I couldn’t help but think of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian woman who, in 2022, died in custody after being arrested by the “morality police” for refusing to wear a hijab.  (Her death set off waves of protest throughout that country.)  Ahmadi, I’m guessing, thought she’d left all that behind when she moved to the US in 1998 to study art.  What she subsequently discovered was that totalitarianism, fueled by religious fanaticism, has no borders, a point made clear by 9/11 and, later, the election of Donald Trump and the ceaseless passage of laws aimed at restricting or ending women’s reproductive rights. 

Consequently, much of what we see in Strands of Resilience are images of thwarted fantasy.  Pink Roots, a mermaid with seaweed sprouting from her navel and mouth, appears to be an image of fecundity until your eye gravitates to the top.  There, we see her hair, as a tangle of roots, coalescing into a “thought balloon.” It filled with pink, red, green and black splotches, readable in this context not as decorative flourishes but as suppurating wounds.  Fiery Descent speaks directly about the artist’s war experience.  It shows an angel hovering above silkscreened photos of children fleeing a bombed-out building.  Bloodstains dot the overhead figure and the scene below, their raw beauty sharply at odds with the terror depicted.  Octopus shows a woman in one of those impossible-to-attain yoga positions attacked by an cephalopod, its tentacles an obvious metaphor for strangulating state power.

The remainder of the exhibition is given over to five small-scale (20 x 16-inch) oil paintings, each containing a solitary (dancing) figure executed with pigments of varying viscosities that bleed into one another. The locus of that activity is the abdomen and uterus, which in Ahmadi’s treatment, includes several in which male sex organs intrude deeper into those regions than would be anatomically possible.  Here again, oppositions.  None of these figures possess feet; what we see, mostly, are pointy stumps. Whether such images represent unshackled desire, fertility, the brutal aftermath of war or some combination of all three is unclear.  What’s more readily apparent is the degree to which Ahmadi has once again, pushed the Persian miniature beyond male heroics, recasting it as a vehicle for heroic female resistance.

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Shiva Ahmadi: “Strands of Resilience” @ Manetti Shrem Museum of Art through May 6, 2024.

 About the author: David M. Roth is the editor, publisher, and founder of Squarecylinder, where, since 2009, he has published over 400 reviews of Bay Area exhibitions.  He was previously a contributor to Artweek and Art Ltd. and senior editor for art and culture at the Sacramento News & Review.