Process as Resistance: In Conversation with Mona Bozorgi
Mona Bozorgi, Unbidden, 2023. Photography, archival inkjet print, dismantled silk, 20 x 20 inches, courtesy of the artist and L’Space Gallery.
Curated by Lili Almog, L’Space Gallery presents FIBRATION III: Anxiety and Hope, the third rendition of their annual fiber art series. The exhibition presents the work of sixteen artists who use textiles to explore the “emotional turbulence of our time, centering fiber arts as a site of embodied resistance, resilience, and radical care.”
Among the sixteen artists is Mona Bozorgi, an Iranian-born artist and scholar whose textile, installation, and photographic practice explores the relationship between performativity and representation. Bozorgi uses photographic materialities to explore the ever-changing notions, contexts, and reciprocal relationships humans have with photographs. Her work challenges the perception of photographs as two-dimensional objects and is concerned with the interconnectness of the material and the meaning behind the work.
The exhibition includes works from Bozorgi’s ongoing series Threads of Freedom (2023–). In response to the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, she began collecting images that Iranian women have taken of themselves and shared on social media. Exploring how Iranian women want to represent themselves, how they want to be seen, she prints their images on silk fabric and then removes individual threads from the weft of the silk. Through physically undoing threads of woven fabric—or “reweaving”—she reveals the bodies of the Iranian women in the images that fabric had concealed.
In this interview, Bozorgi discusses her beginnings in photography, the paradoxical and complex history of textiles, and how she uses process as a form of protest.
Mona Bozorgi, Non-Lethal, 2024. Archival inkjet print on fabric, dismantled, 23 x 23 x 3 in, courtesy of the artist.
Samantha Jensen: Where did you grow up?
Mona Bozorgi: I was born in Tehran. I received my bachelor’s in photography there and also had my own photography business for a few years. I was working as an artist while running my business and had the opportunity to participate in an artist’s residence in Vienna, Austria, which changed my life.
SJ: How does your Iranian background influence your work?
MB: I grew up in a very traditional family. I was always self-motivated and a dreamer, always looking for ways to find more freedom. One day, I was watching a soccer game with my family from home, and I noticed the photographers on the sidelines. I had always wanted to see a game in person, but women in Iran are not permitted to enter the stadium. I thought that if I could photograph the game, I could bypass the restriction and go to the stadium. I pursued photography in college and fell in love with the art form. I realized that a camera in my hands allowed me to navigate society with more freedom, but at times, with less. Once, while working on an assignment for a documentary photography class, I was stopped by undercover officers for taking pictures of young men doing hip hop dances in public. The officers questioned me and removed the film from my camera. It made me aware of the power of photography as a medium in relation to my body, both liberating and restrictive.
SJ: I saw that you first studied photography, and then went onto pursue women’s and gender studies, and then critical studies and artistic practice in fine arts. Did these later areas of study change, complicate, or further the way you use and think about photography?
MB: Even as an artist in Iran, my work was concerned with the representation of women and the restrictions we face in everyday life. My academic and artistic careers were deeply influenced and supported by my mother, who is the first feminist I ever knew. My mother supported not only me, but the women and girls around her. She funded the education and needs for differently-abled children, and much more.
While pursuing my interdisciplinary PhD, one of my areas of focus was women’s and gender studies. It greatly enriched my understanding of various strains of thought and approaches to women’s issues and how they’re explored/expressed through art, but I also carried a sense of tension between some Western feminism and my experience of the “everyday” feminism that my mother and others in Iran enact. Some of this is influencing my current body of work, which highlights feminism as a lived experience for women in Iran.
Mona Bozorgi, Monocular I, 2025. Photography, archival inkjet print, dismantled silk, 30 x 10 inches, courtesy of the artist and L’Space Gallery.
SJ: When did you begin Threads of Freedom? What was the initial inspiration?
MB: In 2022, when the Women, Life, Freedom movement began in Iran. We were all seeing images of mostly young Iranian women sharing their photographs, posting their selfies, and going to protests. I was so empowered and overwhelmed by what I was seeing, but I wasn’t able to participate as I was here in the US. I started this project as I felt the process of making the work was a form of protest, as a way to resonate with their struggle and amplify their messages.
SJ: Can you take me through your process of creating this series?
MB: I saw women’s selfies after removing their hijab—which is against the government and state laws—risking their lives to be seen and heard, as well as images showing their injured bodies, the consequences of their protests. I started to collect publicly shared photographs. I decided to research who these people were in order to learn their stories.
At first, I only worked with images of people whose faces did not align with Western ethics of representation. Not long after, Time Magazine published a photograph of Iranian women taken by Forough Alaei, an Iranian photojournalist, as the “Heroes of the Year.” The photograph shows three Iranian women from behind, taken in a studio, protecting anonymity. After the cover was published, Iranians, particularly those seeing the protests in person, felt that it was not a true image of the risks Iranian women were taking. Not only were women going to the street without covering their faces, but they were also taking photos of themselves and sharing them on social media. They wanted the images of their heroes to face the world.
After the backlash against the image and article, I began thinking about the importance of immanent ethics. I felt I needed a way of approaching the ethical concerns in my project beyond the notion of ethics as definitive and closed. With an approach informed by immanent ethics, I seek to be open, responsive, and attentive to different situations and to discern how to approach each work based on the specific time and space. Those individuals who share their images on social media and want to be seen are the ones who influence me to include their photographs.
Mona Bozorgi, Sarv, 2025. Photography, archival inkjet print, dismantled silk, 28 x 24 inches, courtesy of the artist and L’Space Gallery.
SJ: Threads can represent a connection to people, places, traditions, customs, or a general interconnectedness between everything. They can equate both strength and fragility. Are these themes you are thinking about in your textile work?
MB: Silk threads are incredibly strong. They are so thin, fragile, and beautiful while also being surprisingly resilient. These are qualities I associate with the women in the works I am making. They are strong individually, and all the more so when they work together. The threads also resonate with hair—a direct inversion of the material’s purpose when it is used as a headscarf. An undoing of the fabric to reveal hair happens in both the images and the surface on which they are printed. Threads also connect us digitally, like the movement of the selfies of women exposing their hair in protest, reaching out to others who did the same. Women all over the world cut their hair in solidarity with the acts of protest filmed by Iranian women.
Images on threads have the potential to reveal both the photograph and the material at the same time. When viewed up close, threads are visible. When viewed from afar, the image is legible. So the material and the image have a similar weight.
SJ: You’re physically undoing threads of woven fabric, undoing a practice that has historically been belittled as “women’s work.” And within this undoing—or “reweaving”—you reveal the bodies of the Iranian women in the images, which fabric had concealed. Is engaging with the history of textiles something you explore in your work? Do you see your removal of threads as acts of resistance?
MB: Throughout history, women have had a very complex relationship with making and consuming fabric. Many women were involved in fabric making, particularly spinning fabric, which was considered domestic work, or women’s work, regardless of whether a man or woman was doing it.
The history of textiles is full of paradoxes and complexities that tell stories of civilization, hierarchy, control, and labor, and reveal how culture, nature, and material are intertwined. In these works, I was thinking about the connection with spinning because the techniques required for removing threads—the use of the two fingers—are very similar to techniques required for spinning.
Like many who do textile work, my engagement with fabric involves a great deal of body knowledge. The body plays an important part in the production of knowledge, especially in the creation of art, where touch, pressure, and movement become ways of learning about both material and the body. Many women carry body knowledge and transfer it to subsequent generations, like my grandmother, who taught me embroidery and crochet. Because my body has learned to remove threads, I think of my body as a deconstructive machine that stores knowledge of dismantling fabric.
Mona Bozorgi, Haftsin, 2025. Photography, archival inkjet print on dismantled silk, 28 x 24 inches, courtesy of the artist and L’Space Gallery.
SJ: How is your work configured in L’Space’s exhibition space? Does it converse with any particular works by others in Fibration III?
MB: In the new works to be shown in Fibration III, one piece explores enclosing photographs within a box that serves as both container and threshold, concealing and revealing the images inside. The box is a vessel of collective memory, referencing multiple layers of photographic history and technology: the black box of the cellphone, photographs in archival boxes, and the intimate wooden cases of daguerreotypes.
As the show is currently coming together, I can’t say how my work will be configured in the space. What I can say is that the past two Fibration exhibitions were outstanding, and I am looking forward to seeing L’space’s curation of the exhibition’s third edition. The level of work presented in the previous shows and the dialogue between the pieces was inspiring and timely, engaging meaningfully with the importance of textiles in contemporary art today.
Fibration III: Anxiety and Hope is on view at L’Space Gallery from September 4 through October 25, 2025.
