Maryam Firuzi (IR, 1986)

For years, Maryam Firuzi focused her lens on urban women, while the deeper roots of her homeland existed for her only in books and stories – until she began her journeys. Travelling 60,000 km through mountains and across salt deserts, and also into dense forests, she felt the living pulse of their 7,000-year-old civilization.

What she experienced in all these series was the close connection of Iranian women with creation. Through Scattered Memories of a Distorted Future, painter-artists breathed new life into forgotten places she discovered, inhabiting them with their works. In the Shadow of the Silent Women focuses on communities of women who watch over the cultural and artistic heritage of their civilization, protecting and passing it on. And in the series Women in Mirrors, Baluchi women “sewed” their presence into landscapes that had rendered them invisible, transforming erasure into existence through embroidery.

Carried by many women Maryam Firuzi has known throughout her life, the name “Iran” means «the land of the free people.» Growing up in and nourished by Persian poetry and mythology, Maryam Firuzi always imagined Iran as “a woman riding a horse, her long hair flowing in the wind as she scattered beauty and freedom across the land like seeds.” Now, she realizes how deeply this childhood vision has shaped her artistic view.