Parastou Forouhar

For over three decades, Parastou Forouhar has pursued a unique and sustained inquiry into the relationship between visual clichés and the mechanisms of power and control. By interrogating the expectations these clichés instantly evoke, her works only seemingly conform to them. In Under the Banner series, they allude to aesthetic and cultural norms—ornamental orders, societal conventions, and the Other—yet beneath their surface, Forouhar subverts these assumptions, exposing dynamics of control and othering.

At first glance, her drawings captivate with harmonious, patterned surfaces and calligraphic fluidity. Figures in fluid black dessin emerge momentarily, only to recede into the unseen. A closer look, however, reveals unsettling detail: the intricate patterns are composed of tools of violence in phallic forms, while genderless bodies surface against seemingly benign backdrops, shattering the illusion of harmony. Here she deploys an overcoding of signs that produces an ironic rupture.

Forouhar appropriates ornamental and gendered motifs—forms familiar to the Western gaze—and repositions them in new contexts. By deconstructing these elements, she expands their meanings beyond the expected, challenging viewers to reconsider their perceptions. As she explains,

“My work is a critique of a familiar culture of ornament, which leaves so little room for individualism. In ornamental structure, an overall principle is forced on the components; what doesn’t conform must be rejected and removed. I equate this with a totalitarian system, which also removes what damages the overall order.”

Under the Banner presents faceless figures with smooth, pink skin, devoid of identifying features. Clad in loose, flowing robes, these androgynous forms resist fixed definitions—appearing as subjugated victims or longing figures seeking proximity of the other. By holding the contingency of its observational standpoint as inescapable, the series problematises the distinction between beauty and violence, making it the object of scrutiny. Repeated and interwoven, these figures form patterns that echo Persian carpets, transforming an Orientalist design into a melancholic tableau of suffering and control. Forouhar’s use of irony paradoxically connects heterogeneous elements, undermining rigid dichotomies and evoking the fairytale structures defined by binaries such as good and evil.