[Winter 2025]
Woman, Life, Freedom: Resistance through Images
by Claudia Polledri
In the end, at least one of us will survive your reign to dance, and it will be very beautiful. – Ghazal Golshiri1
On September 17, 2022, in Saqqez, in the Iranian province of Kurdistan, a funeral was held for a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa (Jina) Amini; it was only four days after the morality police in Tehran had arrested her for “inappropriately” wearing her headscarf, or hijab. In numerous videos made during the ceremony, women take off their hijabs and wave them, arms raised to the sky, as a sign of protest against the regime. That same day, a photograph of Amini’s gravestone with the inscription “Dear Jina, you will not die. Your name will become a symbol” appeared on social media. The photobook Tu ne meurs pas (2023),2 by Marie Sumalla and Ghazal Golshiri, respectively a photo editor and a journalist at the daily Le Monde, covers precisely the period between this violent event, which was the genesis for one of the most significant protest movements in contemporary Iran since the 1979 revolution, and the subsequent flow of images that accompanied the demonstrations, including via social networks.
Translated by Käthe Roth
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Woman, Life, Freedom: Resistance through Images – Claudia Polledri]
Claudia Polledri is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the Université de Montréal, where she earned a doctorate in comparative literature devoted to photographic representations of Beirut (1982–2011). An expert in Middle Eastern contemporary photography, she was curator of the exhibition Iran. Poésies visuelles, presented in Quebec in 2019.