In a year like no other, immigrant women of all walks of life reflect on the ever-changing meaning of home and belonging
Bahar’s transcript
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[Opening]
Hello! Welcome to the podcast Real People. Real Lives. Women Immigrants of New York, a storytelling project from New Women New Yorkers.
Real People. Real Lives highlights a diverse picture of immigrant women living in the city. It elevates these narratives, moving beyond statistics and political rhetoric.
In the previous editions of the project, participants were interviewed to share their stories, and were photographed in iconic New York neighborhoods. Photographs and recordings were showcased in physical exhibitions held at several venues in the city, including at the Queens Museum.
In this third iteration, the pandemic framed our choices. We skipped the photographs and opted for a podcast format.
In the Summer and Fall of 2020, we interviewed immigrant women of all walks of life. They were selected through an open call or reached out to directly, to ensure the participation of women from different backgrounds, and affected by the pandemic in various ways.
The participants talked about their immigrant experience within the backdrop of a year like no other – marked by the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and the presidential election. Each story you will hear is a unique mix of determination, hope, challenges, and victories – small and big.
In our very first episode, meet Bahar, a painter from Iran. She came to the US hoping to hone her painting skills. Over the last 15 years, she has created a body of work that explores identity through self-portraits, narrative painting, and drawing. By incorporating Persian motifs, her self-portraits investigate human’s imagination, hopes, fears, dreams, freedom, restriction, sense of place, and belonging. This is also the premise of Real People. Real Lives.
Bahar created a collage for this year’s edition of Real People. Real Lives. Women Immigrants of New York. The medium was chosen because it captures the spirit and mood of this year – fragmented and fast-paced, like our lives shaped by Zoom, social media scrolling, and narrative disputes. Bahar will also facilitate a collage workshop for the other participants in the project.
Now onto the interview!
Moving to the US
As long as I remember myself, I always wanted to do new experiences in life, to discover Western art and culture. I remember when I was a teenager my dream was living and working as a painter in Paris. For that I studied French language in the university in Tehran and then applied for art university in the south of France.
In 2003, I moved from Iran to France for studying arts and seven years later I decided to move to the US. I feel it was the best decision of my life. I could never had the same experiences and exposure If I had stayed in the same place my whole life, in Iran or in France for example.
I was born in a small city, in the north, center north of Iran, called Sharut, but I grew up in Teheran. I was born after the revolution, the exact time of the Iran and Iraq war. That was a very chaotic time, actually. I’ve never seen anything like bombing or battle scenes but I could feel the depression, like my mom, my parents worried about everything. Scenes on TV were sad and dark, I remember everything. That’s why we moved a lot, but we were safe, I went to school regularly, I didn’ t have any problems.
Immigration is a very hard decision and very hard process for everyone. It depends on how old you are, your goals and dreams. I think that, during, in the early stages of adjustment we all often feel that things fall apart. The first year in the US was challenging and the hardest thing I had to deal with was switching languages from French to English, especially in my thirties. It was hard to start over in a new place, find new friends, a community again. But the good thing about human beings is that we are very resilient.
More than anything, I was looking for a place where I could connect to other artists, being part of an arts community. Home for me is an abstract concept, rather than just a place. To me home is a structure, a feeling, a symbol, or a metaphor. I think home is the place closest to our heart, where we can keep alive our identity, integrity and way of living. If you say there’s a connection between home and identity, to me the sense of identity is more connected to my cultural background and the place I grew up. Sometimes I’m more likely to depend on memories and in the past. In that case I love to share my Iranian cultural background as a way to communicate with others and being part of my new home, which is New York, which I love and I care about so much. It’s very complex and it’s a feeling that changes a lot throughout your life.
Finding a voice
I think my art makes people curious to know more about me as a woman, as an artist, Iranian, immigrant. Seventeen years ago, when I moved to France from Iran for the first time I used to draw myself through a mirror and that was my everyday ritual, the way I found to communicate with myself and others beyond the languages. As you know throughout Art History self-portrait has somehow been a fundamental need to women artists to express themselves and their views. Even these days, when you look at social media the desire to share yourself and your moments with everyone has become a daily requirement. Everyone has a camera and selfies are an inseparable part of life.
When you look at Frida’s work, which I really love, you can obtain a lot of emotions and stories in addition to a self-portrait. It’s not just an expression of a moment in the life of the artist. I’m telling my personal story. I see my self-portraits as visual diaries and records of my dreams, thoughts, personal memories. I challenge myself by blurring the lines between subject, object, real, unreal, animal human, eastern, western. I love to show contradictions, because life is full of contradictions, that inspires me a lot to pick, choose symbols, patterns from my cultural background.
I’m often referencing Iranian history, exploring the relationship between contemporary culture and art history, natural history, religion, mythology. Most of the time I start by drawing a crown for my portraits as a symbol of power, victory, honor and glory because I believe every woman is a queen, this is my believe, and their personal story or experiences in life and their dreams make their crowns.
I’m obsessed with medieval illustration for example and Indo-Persian painting, which are made of animals and monsters. I don’t limit myself on anything, I give myself a range of possibilities to make a body of work but I do research about my concept, use the characters and motifs I connect with or the elements that complete the narration of my painting. I like collecting pictures of animals, mixed models. and draw from them and use my imagination as well, which is very close to the idea of collage.
For this project specially…I followed my self-portrait process as usual, to find my idea for making something related to identity and immigration. You see in this work the familiar Persian visuals, such as patterns and symbols of traditional Persian miniature. I printed out my image and applied an acrylic medium to paste them on the board and I got over it with other mediums such as plastic, acrylic paint, ink and colored pencils. The concept of this bird is a kind of mystical bird in Persian culture, it’s called Simurgh, and it’s a bird that is made from 30 birds. Simurgh means 30 birds. It’s kind of flying, going from one place to the other place.
Life in the pandemic
We are all living through computers, windows. Its depressing [laughs]. I work in a home studio, as you see, so my life as an artist hasn’t been changed that much but my point of view on life has been changed. In the beginning, the unpredictability about the future was very terrifying. And everything has been paused, one of my exhibitions was cancelled. I had the feeling of being lost in time. In the first three weeks of self-isolation in March I’ve been very productive, like a crazy machine. I think that was a natural reaction of self-defense to accept that new strange situation and trying to keep my mind quiet for things that are out of our control. But then after those 2,3 intense weeks I stopped painting and I just spent days reading, writing, and my mood was like a rollercoaster. I didn’t know what I was doing. That was so weird. But day after day, I accepted this new life, I became more concentrated and started working hard on the new series of paintings for my solo show in New York. I think that art of any kind, music, film, books, saved us during this pandemic, it helped us reconnect with ourselves first and others and I felt the power of art in my life more than ever. It really helped me to cope better with any wanted or unwanted changes in life.
My opening was in September. That was the time art galleries started to open to the public, and the museums, I think. So people weren’t really sure about coming to the openings. I remember most of the people who attended that night told me that that was their first experience after lockdown coming to openings. That was so weird but I’m so happy that I’ve done it. In normal openings people meet each other, greet each other, it’s fun and at the same time a way to connect to people, you meet new artists, new art lovers. But if you ask me, I don’t remember any faces because all the faces were covered by masks. I couldn’t even recognize my friends. That was funny! So that was weird, but, I mean, we should continue working, living and art is not going to stop.
On being a woman
Being a woman in general, in every different part of the globe, it’s challenging. But I think we face different kinds of challenges in our everyday life as a woman in Iran or in the US, in terms of getting the same or equal opportunities in rights in society or in the workplace. In Iran, the thing is, the government has created and enforced numerous discriminatory laws and regulations limiting women’s participation in the job market for example.
This discrimination against women comes from political ideology that has dominated Iran since the Revolution in 1979, which pushed women to adopted perceived ideal roles as mothers and wives and try to marginalize them from public life or enforcing a dress code like wearing a scarf as a requirement for appearing in public.
In a democratic society like the United States women have more possibilities to take equal part and have less barriers, equal participation in building the future for themselves and their families.
Election Year
Having an irrational person like Trump as a president of the United States where his election slogans was “Make America Great Again ” and “America First” makes you feel separated from the rest of the society as an immigrant. His immigration policies restricted travel from certain countries, the travel ban I’m talking….That was ridiculous, racist. I knew so many Iranian, doctoral students, who couldn’t travel after the travel ban and their studies, their lives… in only one night has changed. They all had student visas and even green cards but you can imagine, just a simple order from a self-centered president can affect how many lives. The reason immigration is not the same for everyone…Not everyone has decided to come to the US for having higher education, opportunities in jobs or just for experiencing other cultures. There are people who escape from wars or atrocities in their countries. That was so unexpected and very harsh towards immigrants.
We dealt with a lot of bad news everyday about Iran, especially the last year…2020 was one of the hardest years. It doesn’t affect my life at all because I’m a citizen here, I live here. It’s been a long time I moved from my country, but emotionally we are all connected. When I see my people, I’m not talking about the government, but the people…they really had a very hard time during these four years. I thought America was a democratic country. That was one of the shocks I had to deal with. That was really challenging emotionally, for me, very difficult for all Middle Easterners and Iranians.
Racism…there is in this country. I’ve seen so many racist behavior towards African-American people. I still have hopes when I see a movement like Black Lives Matter, when people get united to change racist and nacionalist system. I think everyone is responsible and should step out for adding more positive impact to this movement because racism and nationalism are both dangerous to the world and to all nations.
America has faced so many ups and downs during Trump presidency and his policies to fall apart America didn’t work, hopefully, and finally, it’s over: all the surprises, and bad speeches, all the name-calling, bullies, the childish reactions, lack of information, lies, selfishness, selfishness…Oh my god, that a hard word… [laughs] gone with him now and forever, I hope.
Self-confidence, believe in science and facts, respect to our cultural differences, try to share our experiences, Help each other to make a better United States of America as a beautiful multicultural country, being kinder together beyond gender, color, cultural background and religion differences and even trying to make bridges between the US and our homelands to exchange useful experiences and help each other and make the world a better place for everyone.
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[Closing]
Thank you so much for tuning in to our podcast today. This week’s episode was produced by me, Bruna Shapira, and Arielle Kandel. Editing is by Anna Zemskova.
For more information about Real People. Real Lives. and the full transcript of this episode, head to www.nywomenimmigrants.org. Next week, you’ll meet Potri, a nurse from the Philippines.
The 3rd edition of Real People. Real Lives. Women Immigrants of New York is made possible in part with funding from the William Talbott Hillman Foundation.
.See you next week!
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