Classroom Solidarities: Jin Jiyan Azadi (2022 - ongoing)

On Matters Of Resilience (2017) (Copy)

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

Classroom Solidarities (2022-ongoing) 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, the source imagery calls for bodily autonomy and other basic freedoms under continued conditions of severe repression.

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.

The inaugural university iteration of Classroom Solidarities was exhibited 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 globally. 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.)

Throughout the duration of the exhibition, and as freedom of speech was actively being challenged on campus, Rezaeipour 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. Since then, this aspect of the project has also traveled to VCU’s Art Foundations and is in continued engagement with UCLA’s Psychiatry Fellowship program.

Over the years, this series and its root iteration On Matters of Resilience have been exhibited at Frieze Los Angeles (2023), Gallery 30 South (2019), Montgomery College: Takoma Park (2018), Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (2017), and more.

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University of Maryland (September-October 2024)

^ photos by Senna Ahmad

Press / Links

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^ photos by Taneen Momeni

Frieze Los Angeles (February 2023)

In The Studio (2022-present)