From Evin with love

From Concept to Realization

This exhibition is part of the oral history of the women’s movement research project within the framework of the Women’s Movement Museum. It encompasses subjects such as women’s biographies, events, associations, and creations in the artistic, literary, and social fields.

The chronology of the research begins in the latter part of the Qajar period and the advent of the first sparks of the struggle for freedom by Tahiri Qurratu l-ʿAyn, examines the Constitutional Revolution as the pivot point in the women’s movement, and spans the Pahlavi era and the Islamic Revolution until the present time.

The research, based on feminist positionality epistemology, analyses and presents segments of the women’s movement by utilizing artistic frameworks.

Each research project has a two-year term and its findings and outcomes will be made available to the public in digital form as well as in physical thematic exhibits.

The exhibition of handicraft by women inmates in Evin Prison is the first two-year project of the Women’s Movement Museum. Without claiming to be a complete and comprehensive portrait, it offers a concise depiction of the struggles of the women’s movement in Iran during the past decade.

This timeframe represents the ten years that have passed since the initial plan for the Iranian Women’s Movement Museum was conceived. Ten years whose trials and tribulations hurled the founders and supporters of this project to different corners of the fluid and shifting geography of the women’s movement.

 It seems that in the struggle with the cadence of this displacement, day after day they grew more tested and tried until today when from Evin Prison, the darkest corner of Iran’s guests, to The Hague, the brightest coast on the North sea, they have expanded the bridge that connects them. The mortar of this bridge is the sunbaked bricks of the lives of women who in their fight for equality have submitted to imprisonment and entrusted their hearts to the movement’s turbulent sea.

Mansoureh Shojaee

Translator: Sara Khalili