Classroom Solidarities (2017 - ongoing)

Classroom Solidarities at University of Maryland, Sep 3 2024 - Oct 2 2024 ^ photos by Senna Ahmad

On Matters Of Resilience (2017)

On Matters of Resilience: Jin, Jîyan, Azadî (2022-2023)

Classroom Solidarities is an ongoing evolution of On Matters of Resilience — a series that I started in 2017. It all started with deconstructions and reconstructions of photos taken of me during the first days of elementary school in Tehran in the mid 1990s. This distinct juxtaposition between my home life and my life at school under the Islamic Republic’s theocratic rule dictated a separation of self, and through this body of work I was able to begin the process of piecing myself back together. I decided to remove the faces of my classmates from a photo of my first grade class in order to protect their identities. The resulting cutout with just the headscarf uniforms startled me as a stark representation of this condition — our day to day lives inside a system of gender apartheid mandated by a fascist state. It felt powerful to have visually separated all of us from this symbol of the state, these forced pieces of cloth.

On September 16, 2022, Islamic Republic’s ‘Morality Police’ murdered a 23 year old Kurdish Iranian woman Jina (Mahsa) Amini on the basis of ‘improper hijab.’ Protests erupted at her funeral in Saqqez, and then all over Iran framed by the Kurdish slogan: Jin, Jîyan, Azadî (Woman, Life Freedom). The Islamic Regime has since responded with the most violent repression imaginable, imprisoning tens of thousands for dissent, and killing hundreds of its own citizens, including many children. As a bold response to one of IR’s first fear-mongering tactics of occupying several universities last October, photos started populating on social media of womxn and young girls posing without their headscarves in classrooms nationwide. These settings - and these group photos - looked eerily similar to the ones I once posed in as a child, and the series of works I had made with these materials in 2017. These brave youth were risking their lives to take and to pose in photographs without their mandatory headscarves inside of these classrooms, in some instances with their middle fingers raised high. I wanted to honor them and to connect all of our stories by bringing these images together in the same visual language.

I have been working on this project since October 2022, and to date have completed an archive of about two hundred mixed media works with these images as a starting point. As of this fall, they will be exhibited in various interactive iterations, inviting conversation across the Jin, Jîyan, Azadî movement and other feminist struggles and revolutionary movements - past, present, and future - here in the US and across the Global South.

You can visit the inaugural exhibition of this archive at University of Maryland now thru October 2nd. Gallery Hours: M-F 9am-5pm.