Women freed from their scarves and hijabs. And courageous, who appear on social networks – on Instagram, more precisely, the only one accessible in Iran. The movement driven by the rallying cry “Woman, life, freedom” born in September 2022 in reaction to the death of Mahsa Amini, victim of police violence for defying the Iranian dress code, finds an echo in two contemporary art galleries from Montreal.
Leila Zelli presents this fall the result of fourteen months of more concrete political commitment — in her own opinion. Presented at the Dazibao center, his video They make the skies turn brings together the images that Iranian women post on Instagram. “Since the first day of Mahsa’s death [Amini], I share these videos. And I archived them all,” says the Montreal artist born in Tehran, met the day after the inauguration of this exhibition, her second in progress.
At the Pierre-François Ouellette Contemporary Art gallery, his series of ink pad and pencil drawings entitled A song can cross the ocean reproduces the collective and global energy of popular revolts. Femme, vie, liberté even reached downtown Montreal.
“I am very involved in the Phillips Square demonstrations,” confides the woman who has been there every Saturday for a year, where the Iranian community has its habits. For months, she had a workshop nearby and returned there after the gathering was over. “I drew birds and women, endlessly. I didn’t know how many I made, I didn’t care how big it was [de l’oeuvre]. »
“For the first time, my life and my art are one,” summarizes the young forty-year-old, after fifteen minutes of interview. However, she has always reacted to political news. The animated video she produced in 2016 as a baccalaureate graduate at UQAM pays tribute to the victims beheaded by the Islamic State group. Syrian refugees, women banned from sport, an Iranian judoka forced by the state to lose a fight or even the bombings of Gaza (those of 2015-2016) are among the subjects she addressed.
“I was born two years after the Islamic Revolution [1979] and a year after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war [1980-1988] “, she said, without looking for an explanation. However, she knows where her “warrior spirit” comes from: from her father, a karate teacher. “I started karate at two years old. I was a black belt at ten years old. »
Photographer, above all
When she arrived in Quebec twenty years ago, Leila Zelli was already practicing photography in Tehran. She realizes today that she did it out of resistance. Was he forbidden from documenting the street? She photographed her grandmother, her dogs, the wallpaper in the house. “Like Jafar Panahi who films inside a taxi (Taxi Tehran). This is what unites us, Iranian artists. Are we forbidden to create? We do it anyway,” she proclaims.
Since his first individual exhibition (Playground, Galerie de l’UQAM, 2019), the artist is one of those Montrealers of Iranian origin well visible in Quebec’s galleries and artist centers. If Pierre-François Ouellette began to represent it in 2021, it is only now that it has materialized with a (surprising) solo. A song can cross the ocean surprises for the simple reason that it brings together drawings.
The largest of them, which is more than four meters wide, repeats a female figure with arms raised, as if in a sign of victory. This is the strength of a movement that even the most severe doctrine cannot break. In the more gestural drawings, a few individuals seem to fly away from a mass of birds, in a surge of freedom obtained with great effort.
The drawings are surprising, because Leila Zelli is an image artist. She has just received, also this fall, the Lynne-Cohen prize and its $10,000, intended for emerging artists for whom photography occupies a central place. “The role of photography in Leila Zelli’s work is often implied,” reads the press release for the biennial award. His images come not so much from his camera as from his collections on the web.
Kind of collage, the video They make the skies turn captures the abundant audacity of Iranian women, quick to show their hair, to dance, to sing. These acts are reprehensible and subject to arrest or even death, as in the case of Mahsa Amini or, recently, the teenager Armita Geravand.
The Zelli touch is imbued with life, breath, appeasement, rather than hatred or horror. Even if terrifying images emerge in the twenty minutes that the video lasts, the tone is rather hopeful.
“You can see in the drawings the emotions I was experiencing [après les manifestations] : frustration, a lot of tears and a whole lot of hope, which is always there. I really believe in it. If we didn’t have hope, we wouldn’t get up in the morning,” she says.
Islamic and misogynistic Iran saddens him. But Leila Zelli is convinced that it is through resistance and disobedience that the situation will change. And it is already changing. All she wanted to show in these two exhibitions was an Iran other than that of scarves and hijabs. Reflect these small victories of courage and emancipation. “I want to be a good representative of Iran. I do not want the shadow of the dictatorship to distort the beauty of the whole country, of its people,” she concludes, in her soft but firm voice, worthy of the karateka she was as a child.