Classroom Solidarities: Jin Jiyan Azadi (2022 - ongoing)

University of Maryland (College Park, MD), Fall 2024

On Matters Of Resilience (2017)

Classroom Solidarities: Jin, Jîyan, Azadî (2022-ongoing)

Classroom Solidarities is an analog remaking of some 200 digital protest images and videos produced by womxn and young girls in classrooms across Iran. Disseminated through social media starting in the first few months of the Jin Jiyan Azadi (womxn, life, freedom) movement in 2022 and continuing through to the renewed waves of protest in 2026, the source imagery calls for bodily autonomy and other basic freedoms alongside the dually deadly conditions of severe repression imposed by a theocratic fascist state and war waged by imperialist forces.

Borrowing visual language from On Matters of Resilience (2017) — an autobiographical series based on an archive of childhood writings, drawings, and photographs from 1990s Tehran — Rezaeipour weaves together material from these recent protests in analog collage, film, and sound-based works. At a time when student-led demonstrations against injustice face alarmingly similar repression in the US and across the globe, Classroom Solidarities asks how the classroom – at times a site of violence – can be a generative space for transformation.

Screen Shot 2024-12-20 at 5.56.16 PM.png

The inaugural university iteration of Classroom Solidarities was curated by Gabrielle Tillenburg in University of Maryland’s Art and Sociology Building at the student-led Herman-Maril Gallery in September-October 2024. As part of the installation, Rezaeipour screened stop motion material re-enacting the archive layered with sound from connected feminist and revolutionary struggles in Afghanistan, Sudan, Palestine, and here in the US. The classroom also presented students and audiences with several questions from the artist’s 7th grade science notebook from Iran:

What do we know about energy?

How do we know when power has been used?

With great effort we try to move a big rock forward or backward, but it remains still. Has any power been used? Has any work been done? Explain your answer.

Rezaeipour has workshopped these and more questions in several courses at the university including: Art and Activism, Public Art, Visual Storytelling, and Art and Activism in Iran. Later, Rezaeipour developed a mixed media workshop component that invites participants to bring an image of a classroom from their own lives and transform it using a series of deconstruction / reconstruction prompts. The project has been presented at UMD, VCU, UCLA, UCSF, and Northwestern.

The installation pictured below is currently showing at The Phillips Collection (Washington DC) as part of Tomorrow The Sun Will Rise thru September 20, 2026.