On September 16, 2022, a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini was beaten to death in Tehran. Detained on the road and separated from her family, she was tortured and killed by the Gasht-e-Ershad, Iran’s morality police. Her crime? Improperly wearing the hijab, exposing her hair. Within hours, protesters had filled the streets of Tehran and many other cities.
Seven thousand miles away in San José, California, the Iranian-American painter Sameh Khalatbari watched the news on television. As a woman who’d been forced to cover her hair before she emigrated to the United States in 2013 at the age of 32, Khalatbari felt intense distress. She nervously sketched as she stared at the TV. When she looked down at the iPad resting in her lap, she found that she’d drawn hundreds of lines.
“I felt a responsibility to be the voice of the people in Iran and to spread the word with my art,” she recalls. “But I couldn’t be direct. I still have family there. When I visit, I could be arrested.” She immediately understood that her art could not be figurative. She could not use portraiture, or depict the human body, as she had in past artwork. The marks on her iPad suggested an alternative: “I thought of using the lines I’d drawn as a symbol of women’s hair.”
To embody her ideas and express the intensity of her feelings, Khalatbari developed an entirely new technique. In the past, Khalatbari always painted in acrylic on prepared canvases. For the new body of work, she uses string, which she extends across canvas she stretches herself. “I make everything from scratch to show how this movement grew up from the heart of so-
ciety, and how people naturally came to the street,” she explains. “All of the fibers are natural, evoking women’s hair.”
In fact, metaphor is woven into every aspect of the work. One of the most significant qualities is the tension Khalatbari applies to her fibers. This tension gives both form and substance to her compositions, as expressed in the formula Khalatbari has invented as a title for the present exhibition.
N/m², or newtons per square meter, is the metric unit of stress or pressure. (The newton is the force that gives a mass of one kilogram an acceleration of one meter per second per second.) Khalatbari combines this standard unit with the number 1401, which is the year of the protests according to Iran’s traditional Solar Hijri calendar. The pressure of the 1401 protests manifests as sociopolitical resistance, which pervades every aspect of society. 1401 N/m² Resistance is more than just a label for this body of work. It denotes a new reality.
Khalatbari conceived 1401 N/m² Resistance as an opus. Although each canvas stands on its own, their meaning is deepened through their interrelationship. Four of the works in the series are black, each bearing the name of a city where the protests were especially intense, suggesting the darkness of events. Tehran, Esfahan, Rasht, Zahedan: The edges of each composition align with those adjacent, evoking the connection between protesters who are separated geographically yet united in their commitment. In this complex arrangement, the threads simultaneously
Installation view of 1401 N/m² Resistance -
Cities: Tehran | Esfahan
| Rasht | Zahedan
stand for the hair on women’s heads and for their sisterhood.
The remainder of the works are white, which Khalatbari chose to show the calm perseverance of women in spite of their inner pain. Their large scale and contrast with the black paintings makes the statement all the bolder. White represents purity, standing for the stoic nobility of resistance.
Colored thread runs through all of Khalatbari’s works. In the black paintings, the thread is yellow, a symbol of hope emerging from the darkness, binding the righteous. In the white paintings, a red thread symbolizes those who died in the protests, reminding viewers of the violence underlying gender apartheid in Iran.
Like Mahsa Amini, every woman who allows her hair to be seen stands to be victimized by the police. Yet the red thread also binds those who choose to resist, adding to the tension, bolstering the resistance.
In aesthetic terms, Khalatbari’s abstract canvases evoke the sculpture of Eva Hesse, such as the untitled rope pieces Hesse made in 1969 and 1970. Although Hesse’s work spans three-dimensional space and the fiber is slack, both artists hold the viewer ’s attention through their mastery of raw materials and physical forces. This visceral effect is counterbalanced by the ethereal quality Khalatbari achieves through her commitment to symbolism. Her deft symbolic deployment of color connects her work to Bauhaus masters such as Johannes Itten and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as Persian book illustration from the Achaemenid Empire through the Islamic caliphates.
Yet Khalatbari distinguishes herself from these aesthetic forebears because her art is also resolutely political. Like Mona Hatoum and Tania Bruguera, she seeks to enact change in the world through her art. Khalatbari’s work is contemporary not only in artistic terms but also in terms of current events. Inspired by the protests she witnessed on TV, they are acts of protest in their own right.
For many artists, abstraction and politics would be in tension. Khalatbari apparently feels no pressure to choose between them, balancing them as meticulously and elegantly as a mathematical equation.
I was born in the capital city of Iran, Tehran in 1980. I started my art life at 10 and earned my Master of Fine Art in Illustration from Art and Architecture University of Tehran in 2012. I worked on a master thesis about “Effect of Folk Tale’s Fantasy on Illustration” which was rewarded an excellent acceptance by the jury.
I started working as a TA at the University of Art and Applied Science while yet being a student and after graduation, I was promoted to a lecturer. I held my first art show in Tehran in 1989 followed by more than 20 art shows in Iran, United Arab Emirates, Germany, and the United States.
Granted “Genius immigrant status” as an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability Artist” in 2013, I moved to the United States to start a new chapter in my life, and now am residing in San José, California.
Since early 2014 I started collaborating with various international artists, and in some instances have held collaborative exhibitions with them. “FACE2015” project, presented in Germany, Italy and the United States was the last of those.
The body of my artworks is established based on Symbolic Contemporary Surrealism. In almost all of my artworks, my critical point of view towards society, politics, and culture is reflected through the extensive implementation of known Persian symbols. These symbols have a deep root in rich Persian culture and literature. I try to rearrange symbols to the new conceptually layered image.
2023 “1401 N/m² Resistance,” Modernism Inc, San Francisco
2014 “Once upon a time,” Seyhoun Gallery, Los Angeles
2011 “Once upon a time,” Atashzad Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran
2009 “Tulips,” Atashzad Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran
2007 “Dubai summer surprises (DSS 2007),” Dubai, United Arab Emirates
2007 “Oil color painting,” Mani Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran
2005 Fine handworks of “Illumination” and “Flower and Bird,” Seyhoun Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran
2023 “Creative Women, Art in Honor of Women,” 245 Post St, San Francisco
2022 “Emotions 2022,” Gallerium Exhibition, International Online Group Show
2021 “SF-Blue,” Modernism West | Foreign Cinema, San Francisco
2017 “Generation plus,” Pars Equality Center, San José
2016 “Vision: An Artist’s Perspective,” Kaleid Art Gallery, San José
2016 “Mirror Holder of History,” Illustration Exhibition, Tehran Gallery, University of Tehran, College of Fine Art, Tehran, Iran
2015 “FACE2015,” New Media Art, The Internet of Nothing” at SOS Indiebio, San Francisco and Rose Art Room, Los Angeles
2015 “FACE2015,” New Media Art, The Internet of Nothing” at PELATOON Kunsthalle, Berlin, Germany
2015 “Illustration exhibition,” Pardis Art Gallery, Iranian Art Museum & Garden, Tehran, Iran
2015 “Once Upon Time 2,” Painting Exhibition, SOMAcentral, J.P. Morgan & Chase Building, San Francisco
2014 “FACE2014,” a.Muse Gallery, San Francisco
2013 “The 6th Tehran International Biannual of Illustration,” Saba Cultural-Art Complex, Tehran, Iran
2012 “Illustration Exhibition,” Saey Cultural Center, Tehran, Iran
2010 “The 3rd Fair International Festival of Visual Arts,” Saba Cultural-Art Complex, Tehran, Iran
2007 Behzad Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran
2006 “The 6th Iranian Traditional Painting Biennial,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran, Iran.
2002 “The 5th Iranian Traditional Painting Biennial,” Niavaran Cultural Center, Tehran, Iran
2000 “The 4th Iranian Traditional Painting Biennial,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran, Iran
