In early December, over 300 volunteers crowded onto the lawn of New York’s Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park, designed by Louis Kahn. The crowd gathered to form a waving embodiment of the free-flowing hair of Nika Shahkarami, a 16-year-old girl found dead after joining a protest in Tehran in September over the death, in police custody, of Mahsa Amini. As part of the ongoing Eyes on Iran demonstrations, French street artist JR invited the volunteers to move their arms behind his large-scale portrait of Nika, installed near a version of Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s Offered Eyes, whose penetrating gaze animated the park’s steps across the East River from the United Nations headquarters.
Neshat’s piece sits alongside works by artists including Sheida Soleimani, Aphrodite Désirée Navab, Shirin Towfiq, Sepideh Mehraban, Mahvash Mostala, and Hank Willis Thomas. The constellation of public work by these artists and activists called attention to the UN vote on December 14 to exclude the Islamic Republic of Iran from its Commission on the Status of Women.
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