Fatemeh Fani
Curled as if Still in the Womb, 2025
Tintype
4" x 5"
Wish It Was True, 2025
Tintype
4" x 5"
As an Iranian woman immigrant to the United States, I live between two worlds, tethered to both and navigating the complexities of dual identities. Sleepless, I clung to the news, far from home yet unable to feel distant. In this unrest, I began creating self-portraits: images of myself pretending to sleep, performing stillness while confronting fear, insomnia, exile, and the fragile line between survival and self. The self-portraits are in a position of vulnerability, stillness, and surrender. These figures exist between states,invoking both the living and the dead. The cicadas, creatures known for their song and their long, hidden lives underground, become metaphors for voices silenced, for life cycles interrupted, for buried trauma.
This body of work, based on my personal traumatic lived experience, is in response to censorship and media indifference about horrifying incidents that are happening for Iranian women in Iran.
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- Fatemeh Fani