After protests, brushstrokes of reform in Iran

For anyone wondering what has happened to the mass protests that convulsed Iran last fall, look away from the public square to center stage. The annual arts festival in the southern French city of Avignon opened its venues yesterday to a celebration of what one featured Iranian photographer described as “this beauty, this resilience, this hope” of equality.

That won’t be welcomed by the regime in Tehran, which the United Nations Human Rights Council accused last week of extrajudicial detentions, executions, and greater repression of women and girls in response to the demonstrations. The festival is voicing what the ruling Islamic mullahs have sought to muzzle – a mental liberation from tyranny, rooted in a sense of dignity and spirituality as deeply individual.

“We have to come here and let the Western world know that the people’s uprising is still going on,” Mina Kavani, a playwright and performer who helped organize the festival’s Iranian program, told Le Monde newspaper. “That young people are modern, talented and determined to break the shackles of Islam, dictatorship and censorship.”

Art has a long history in freedom movements. Its power lies in its ability to lift societies beyond fear through common narratives. In South Africa, music, visual art, drama, and literature nourished both the struggle against racial segregation and the transitional justice that followed. Art is doing the same now in Sudan, where creativity is forging unity, reconciliation, and resilience amid a resumption of war.

In communities torn by conflict, says Khalid Kodi, a Northeastern University art professor, participatory art projects promote problem-solving – “not to just run to a Kalashnikov [rifle] to solve [this or] that problem,” he told the school’s magazine recently.

The protests in Iran were sparked last September by the death of a young woman during her detention by the regime’s morality police for failing to cover her hair in strict accordance with Islamic law. The incident sparked the largest backlash since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The regime’s violent response helped turn the movement’s slogan – “Women, life, freedom” – into a rally cry for justice heard around the world.

Mass protests have given way to furtive acts of performative defiance quickly recorded and disseminated across scores of social media channels inside and beyond Iran. The festival in Avignon follows similar events in New York and Los Angeles showing the works of hundreds of artists depicting the struggles and resilience of Iranian women. Art murals celebrating the life of Mahsa Amini, the young woman killed in custody, adorn buildings in cities around the world. “The socio-political legitimacy of the Iranian government to rule has been fundamentally called into question,” a Dutch study concluded in March.

In a different social uprising, a young resident of Paris’ migrant neighborhoods that erupted over a police killing of a young man of Arab descent two weeks ago told Le Monde that “to understand when something’s happening, you have to be there when nothing’s happening.” Protest movements inevitably subside. But the aspirations they vent endure and evolve.

As the French organizers wrote on the Avignon festival’s website, “Iranian creators challenge us on the basis and meaning of our republican motto, ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’: Freedom for creators, Equality for women, Fraternity to express the universalism of their causes.”