Installation, wood, music, and spatial arrangement, 2013
Seven Tombstones for Seven Iranian Women is an installation work I created in 2013 as part of my undergraduate artistic practice. The project consisted of seven wooden tombstones dedicated to seven Iranian women who had significant cultural influence in Iranian women’s history, memory, and cultural life.
The work brought together wood, carving, symbolic form, music, and spatial arrangement. Each tombstone was conceived not only as a commemorative object, but also as a material form through which questions of gender, memory, cultural recognition, and posthumous presence could be explored.
This installation marked an important early moment in my artistic and intellectual development. Long before my doctoral research on death, mourning, cemeteries, and the agency of dead bodies in Iran, I was already working through related questions in visual and material form. The tombstone became, for me, not simply an object of burial or remembrance, but a site where memory, gender, absence, and cultural agency could be made visible.
Looking back, this work represents one of my earliest attempts to connect art, death, material culture, and anthropology. It also anticipated many of the questions that later became central to my academic research: how the dead remain socially present, how material forms organize memory, and how commemorative objects can generate recognition, obligation, and public meaning.
Image: Wooden tombstone from Seven Tombstones for Seven Iranian Women, installation, 2013.
Sound Component
The installation was accompanied by a musical piece titled Sang-e Sabur. The piece was composed and performed by Ilia Moshtaghizadeh, a musician from Shiraz. Rather than functioning as background music, the sound component was part of the spatial and emotional structure of the installation. It shaped the viewer’s encounter with the seven wooden tombstones and deepened the work’s engagement with memory, absence, gender, and commemoration.
Audio caption:
Sang-e Sabur
Composed and performed by Ilia Moshtaghizadeh
Sound component for Seven Tombstones for Seven Iranian Women, 2013.