Footage of Iranian officials’ attack on students at Tehran’s Sharif University last October moved Dina Nasser-Khadivi, an art adviser and curator, to do more than post on social media to express her solidarity with the ongoing protest movement. Distress about the turmoil in her home country caused her to miss a flight to London for Frieze, but the delay gave Nasser-Khadivi extra time to craft a strategy.
“I had to start with my own art community and use the skills I have from creating exhibition materials,” she says. She called a designer friend in London to sketch a graphic that reads, in Farsi, English and French, “Woman, Life, Freedom”, the slogan that has become synonymous with many Iranians’ fight for women’s rights following the death in September of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish Iranian woman, after she was arrested for not wearing her hijab “properly”. Upon arriving in London, Nasser-Khadivi grabbed a box of T-shirts and tote bags emblazoned with the slogan and headed for the fair tent at Regent’s Park.
“I don’t want this initiative to have any corporate red tape around it,” she says. “The whole beauty is in its simplicity—a form of gift-giving and community building.”
Marina Abramović holding a "Woman, Life, Freedom" Tshirt Courtesy Dina Nasser-Khadivi
Since then, members of the art world—including the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artists Shirin Neshat, Theaster Gates and Marina Abramović, the dealer Emmanuel Perrotin and others—have donned the T-shirt or clutched the bag to express solidarity with the movement. Nasser-Khadivi and her collaborators across the world hand out each item free of charge and ask participants to post photographs featuring the accessories on social media with the hashtag #postitforwardwlf, which is also the handle for the project’s own Instagram account.
“This is an intersectional unity,” Nasser-Khadivi says. “We are not anti-religion or against any belief but rather support women’s freedom as well as the rights of the LGBTQ+ community and the future of the environment.”
The slogan has spanned the globe, appearing at different art fairs, museum shows and other events. In December, Nasser-Khadivi was handing out shirts and bags at Art Basel in Miami Beach, and earlier this month she was distributing them at the Luis Barragán-designed Casa Gilardi in Mexico City during Zona Maco. This week she is in Los Angeles along with the rest of the international art crowd for Frieze Los Angeles and its many collateral events, “Woman, Life, Freedom” attire in tow.