The paradox of the passport is that for some , it is wielded as an instrument of unchecked mobility , and for others , it is weaponized to violate one ’ s rights . In naming the work Articles 18 and 19 , Iranian-born Mona Bozorgi directly references the specific articles of Iran ’ s Passport Law of 1973 , which bar married women from obtaining a passport without their husband ’ s written permission and may require that women receive a male guardian ’ s approval to leave the country .
Bozorgi , who has lived in Iran under its oppressive laws for women , engages with the Iranian passport not as an object of mobility but as a socio-political tool of discrimination and control . In this photo-sculptural work , Bozorgi prints a photograph of the inside front pages of the Iranian passport onto silk fabric . Although it begins centered in the frame , intact and with an aesthetic that is delicate and feminine , the silk fabric is laboriously pulled apart , its threads individually stripped and stretched to the edges . The work devolves into the grotesque , paralleling how the preciousness of a passport becomes a dangerous harbinger of the policing of women ’ s bodies . The artist ’ s time-consuming work to deconstruct the fabric-printed passport , to brush , cut , tangle , and untangle its threads , is an attempt to liken them to hair , which under Iranian morality laws , women must always cover . “ I am interested in using hair to question how a personal choice of migration and mobility is a socio-religious-political issue for women in Iran ,” states Bozorgi . In doing so , Articles 18 and 19 is a timely work , invoking the current acts of protests by Iranian women cutting their hair in public as a form of dissent against the country ’ s strict morality laws .
The above text is translated in Farsi below .
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