Ahoo Hamedi (Iran)

Iranian women - and it could not have been anyone but Iranian women in Hamedi's pictures, given their classic sharp Persian features - and their long stifled demands for legal equality, greater individual rights and democratic development for their country, have been at the core of the "green movement" struggling for reform in Iran today. But it has not been without an exorbitant prize. Many women have been tortured, forced to confess and even raped in jail. They have been subjected to intense surveillance, intimidation, imprisonment, exorbitant bail fines and restrictions on their right to travel abroad, among other punishments meted out to them by the regime. Yet they have heroically managed to make their struggle a broad-based one, something that has penetrated the intensely male dominated political sphere of Iran.

Hamedi, according to one writer who has seen her exhibition in Iran, portrays part of the reality of Iranian women in a very firm yet gentle and delicate way. Through ink on handmade paper, she draws intimate portraits. Her figures and face-pictures gaze out at you or look far away, in a struggle for expression. Depending on whether the paper is dry or humid, the ink sticks or spreads. When it spreads, it gives a weepy effect to the paintings.

The most catching feature of the figures is their eyes. Dark and deep, they are mirrors of the soul. In them, one can find emotions like apprehensiveness, pensiveness and at times even a touch of triumphant joy. Hamedi's figures, when she draws them full length, are slim, taut and coiled. Not for her are blowsy, out-of-shape characters who have long given up their fight against inequalities. The proactive approach on the artist's part, said B_asement curator Narges Hamzianpour, "is something Hamedi shares with her own generation."

Hamedi was born in 1981, thus establishing her birthday on the same time line as the bulk of the Iranian population, which is younger than 30 years old. She graduated in 2005 in Painting from Azad University, Tehran, where she lives and works. Her pictures, as shown at B_asement, were not beautiful in the classical sense. But they had a rough, arresting presence that spoke volumes.

Muhammad Yusuf