In the autumn of 2022, men could be seen carrying buckets of paint around the streets of Tehran. They were covering up murals – typically stencils depicting the faces of smiling young women accompanied by a slogan in Farsi or Kurdish: ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’. The street art movement had begun during the mass protests following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa or Jina Amini, arrested by morality police for allegedly not wearing hijab to government standards.
Such images projected a face of Iran unfamiliar to many in the West, reflecting the spectrum of identities, sub-cultures and politics that exist in a country which is often misunderstood – or deliberately misconstrued – beyond its borders.
