Sonia Balassanian, Portrait 13, 1983. Collage and acrylic on paper.

Sonia Balassanian is an Iranian artist of Armenian descent. She began her career as an abstract painter but the events of 1979 would have a decisive impact on her aesthetic, reorienting it from abstraction to political art. Balassanian’s art focuses on social and political issues affecting marginalized populations in Iran, among them women and ethnoreligious minorities. Her mixed media approach emphasizes the fragmented and ephemeral nature of such social categories. Balassanian has produced a series of collages on the Iran hostage crisis, Hostages—A Diary (1979). Her most prominent body of work is a series of self-portraits (1983) examining the oppression of women in East through the symbolism of the hijab and the literalness of the fixed gaze.

The portraits were published for the first time in the United States in an eponymous book. (It’s a lucky accident that my sister found this book for $1.00 at the Strand, otherwise I would have never known of her.) Salar Abdoh, who wrote the text for the book, explains:

Before the pageant of veiled Middle Eastern women turned ubiquitous on the walls of Western art galleries, before the image of the exotic female in hejab became a staple of glossy art magazines, before international news organizations were fixated over the figures of cloaked mothers and sisters grieving over their martyrs, there existed Sonia Balassanian’s Portraits, a searing photographic sequence from a single frontal shot of a woman in traditional head-cover holding fast to the onlooker’s gaze no matter how despoiled and tattered her face appeared from one print to the next.

Balassanian’s work precedes that of Shirin Neshat, the most famous Iranian woman artist, who relies heavily on both textual sources and self-portraiture to make a commentary on the status of women in post-revolutionary Iran. Like other female artists from the Middle East, among them, Ghada Amer and Lalla Essaydi, Neshat was prescient enough to run with the idea of Islamic calligraphy, which is just as harmonious and pleasing to look at as the female form, creating an uncanny and under-explored correspondence.

But as Abdoh suggests, in the West, this association may have reached its saturation point, becoming counterproductive. In the landscape of contemporary art, calligraphic text and the Muslim woman artist are now virtually synonymous, and the tradition of social activism through art has taken a backseat to the aesthetic fetishization of the hijab as a kind of emblem of sexual repression to be emancipated through exposure. Neshat’s sexy, kohl-rimmed eyes, pointed pistol and uneasy energy only make us want to undress her. Much like Gauguin’s sturdy, Polynesian beauties, the Eastern female becomes a fetish object, supine and submissive, and the Western male becomes her new captor. It is a provocation to East and West alike.

I’m reminded of a quote I read somewhere, which I’ll paraphrase: There’s no essential difference between the Russian and the Iranian woman. Both are enslaved, only one wears a bikini under a fur coat, and the other, a chador. On the other hand, Balassanian, the first to mine this powerful associative apparatus, uses text as both a surrogate for act of recording injustice and a symbol of the fragility of memory.