Four months of nationwide protests in Iran fueled by the death in police custody of the 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa (Jina) Amini have almost abated, and the government is now wreaking vengeance through a string of executions and arrests.
Despite overarching disillusionment, however, the situation remains fraught, and experts say the government’s refusal to address the protesters’ grievances means people will storm the streets again eventually.
In what appears to be a period of a deep split between the top leadership brass and the public, the authorities are seeking to paint a rosy picture of the status quo, and one way to do that is to resort to arts and culture to feign normalcy.
The officials of the administration of hardline President Ebrahim Raisi, who have in principle been resistant to forms of art that don’t carry religious or revolutionary connotations, are appealing to artists to resume their activities.
The appeals come at a time when the government has been on a spree of arresting musicians, filmmakers, actors, authors, visual artists, and any prominent public figure who ventured to raise their voice in support of the protest movement, one that has been crushed violently.
In December, a member of a committee set up to keep track of the artists facing judicial action said an inventory of motion-picture professionals, including actors and actresses, has been put together showing that 150 of them have either been summoned to a court, detained, pleaded guilty, banned from leaving the country, or faced other punitive measures.
The detainees included Taraneh Alidoosti, Iran’s most famous actress, who starred in the Academy Award–winning film The Salesman. Her detention sparked international outrage, with Hollywood celebrities Robert De Niro, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Emma Thompson and Marion Cotillard calling for her freedom. She was freed on January 4 after nearly three weeks in prison.
Musicians have had their own share of the ruling clerics’ wrath. Shervin Hajipour, the Grammy Award–winning singer of the viral song “Baraye,” which clocked 40 million views on Instagram shortly after release and became the unofficial chorus of the protests, was arrested on September 29 and released on bail five days later.
Babak Jahanbakhsh, a noted pop singer, announced in January that he would be giving up his singing stint after his passport was confiscated while trying to depart via Tehran’s international airport.
In the early stages of the protests, Homayoun Shajarian, a distinguished singer and the son of the legendary Mohammad Reza Shajarian, told media on October 9 that his passport was taken from him upon returning to Iran from a concert tour in Australia.
The common denominator in the words and actions of these artists was that they had all voiced support for the protesters and dared to challenge the sacrosanct that is the Islamic Republic. But the irony is that after targeting these illustrious figures and alienating their supporters, the government is now imploring to them to go back to business as usual and enliven the nation’s cultural and artistic scene, one that has been in recession for months now.
In September, Mohammad Mehdi Esmaili, Iran’s minister of culture, asked artists to inject hope in the society and invite people to embrace calm. In December, he pleaded with musicians to resume their performances. The artists refused to respond positively at a time when the fissures in society are more acute than ever and hundreds of families are mourning the loved ones they lost in the government crackdown.
No major singer has held any concerts since the protests erupted last September.
“Any intention from Iranian authorities is dubious. They could be trying to use art and music as a distraction or an attempt to normalize or downplay the ongoing situation in Iran,” said Raheleh Filsoofi, an interdisciplinary artist and assistant professor of ceramics at Vanderbilt University in the US state of Tennessee.
“The authorities are acutely aware that the artists’ silence or refusal to perform in state-controlled platforms is a powerful condemnation of the government. Additionally, the government may be feeling a notable financial loss since the cultural art scene has been virtually non-existent for the past several months,” she told Asia Times.
While Iranians endure a stretch of collective grief, the government has run the Fajr Festivals, its flagship artistic event in music, film, visual arts, theater and poetry held annually to observe the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. This time around, many famed artists boycotted the state-sponsored extravaganza as a show of unity with the protesters.
“Since the start of the recent protests in Iran, more and more artists have publicly and via their social-media platforms denounced the Fajr Festivals,” said Pamela Karimi, an Iranian-American architect who is also a professor of art education and media studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
“It is hard to predict what the future holds. But it is possible that the Fajr Festivals will become increasingly exclusive and only of interest to hardliners and propaganda artists of the regime.”
Karimi says the younger, more rebellious artists will try to find other venues to showcase their products and will not rely on spaces provided by the government to share their artwork with the public.
Yet some observers believe the government doesn’t care if a cohort of the nation’s most popular artists have become antagonized, as it will seek to co-opt the more obedient, less creative artists to entertain public events, imparting the message that there is no disruption to artistic and cultural life.
“They already know that the majority of artists oppose them, especially after the recent brutal crackdowns and executions. But the government does not care at all if the majority of the nation’s prominent artists are not willing to be part of the official state-run events,” said Mohsen Mohammadi, a musician and the director of Indo-Persian Music at the Department of Ethnomusicology, University of California, Los Angeles.
“They are imploring the bands to restart working to normalize the situation by animating the country’s cultural scene, but musicians’ unofficial strike sends a powerful message of resistance, that the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement has not ended, and the situation is not normal,” he told Asia Times.
Despite the Islamic Republic showing the extent of its coercive force to extinguish the sprawling protest movement, it still needs to appeal to a disgruntled constituency through soft power to project legitimacy and wipe out the bitterness that has been accumulated over the past months.
This will be a daunting task for the establishment, but it will continue to seek a narrative to replace the language of defiance and revolt most Iranian artists are using these days.
“This is in nature an attempt to erase and cover the unprecedented imagery this movement and Jina’s revolution is broadcasting,” said Pedram Baldari, an interdisciplinary artist and assistant professor in visual arts at the College of Visual Arts and Design, University of North Texas.
“Every movement at this scale generates its own visual, cultural, social paradigm, it abnormalizes the plain upon which reality exists and by that generates its own subjects who respond and live that reality. In this reality the regime is completely delegitimized.
“Of course, to break that reality, to normalize the society to recapture a different image, the government needs to use different tools other than that of security forces. Every extra day more armed forces exist on the streets is against the government,” he told Asia Times.
Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian journalist. A Chevening Scholarships alumnus, he has reported on grants by the Council of Europe, UNESCO and Deutsche Welle. He is a 2021 Dag Hammarskjold Fund for Journalists fellow and a 2022 World Press Institute fellow. In 2015, he reported from the United States, Malaysia and Pakistan on a Senior Journalists Seminar fellowship by the East-West Center. Follow him on Twitter @KZiabari.