Remembering Atefeh – acquired by museum
‘Remembering Atefeh,’ 2013, easily my most photographed and probably mostly widely shown pot, has been acquired by the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. This is biggest collection of art by women in Europe and one of the major collections of feminist art.
It was started in the early 1990s and has slowly built up since. It is now recognised as a museum quality collection. Remembering Atefeh will join another of my works, Wedding Feast, 1999, and will take its place alongside major works by twentieth century women artists such as Maud Sulter and Lubaina Himid.
‘Remembering Atefeh,’ is a feminist work, made over two years, with a group of Iranian friends as part of a memorial to Atefeh herself and also as a protest against the treatment of women and girls by the regime in Iran.
Atefeh Rajavi Sahaaleh, (1987-2004,) was a small town girl, whose mother died when she was very young and whose father, an addict, neglected her. Isolated, lonely, and extremely vulnerable, she was raped a the age of 12 by a taxi driver, formerly a member of the Revolutionary Guard, and prostituted. She – not her pimp or her rapists – was imprisoned, numerous times and, when she threatened to go public, she was sentenced to death and hanged, on August 15th, 2004, aged 16, for ‘crimes against chastity.’
Even in Iran, it is illegal to execute a child so her documents were falsified. She is not the only one and Iran is not the only country that does this. The response in Iran was muted at first because the state owned and controlled media covered it up. Word got out though and women got increasingly angry.
The criminalisation of underage girls and corresponding impunity of their abusers will be horribly familiar to sex trade survivors the world over but, in Iran, where the bodies of women and girls are used to symbolise the male (dis)/’honour’ of the nation state, it takes on another dimension: in effect the state is the pimp.
This pot was was smashed in front of the Iranian Embassy in London on the anniversary of her murder, in 2011, and rebuilt, leaving pieces out so you can see the image of Atefeh inside. It remains the only image there is of her – from her ID card. The gaps are picked out in gold to honour her short life and her brave attempt to fight the injustices she faced, alone and hugely disadvantaged.
Feminist Iranian human rights lawyer, Nasrine Sotoudeh, made the following observation on Atefeh’s case and countless others like hers:
“The courts somehow deal much more rigorously with the women than with the men. The weakest point in our downfall is that this is happening right in front of our eyes but, sadly, we pretend that we just don’t see it.”
Sotoudeh has herself been imprisoned and beaten on numerous occasions for standing up for girls like Atefeh and trying to represent and defend them in court.
I am delighted that it is now part of the Women’s Art Collection.