Created together with Atoosa Farahmand
Exhibited in Vienna, Malmö, Stockholm, Jönköping, Paris, Örebro, Open Art 2024-2025,Capri (Villa San Michele) 2025, Baerum Kunsthall, Oslo, 2026, Fotografiska Stockholm 2026, alpha nova & galerie futura, Berlin 2026, Ex Nihilo, Copenhagen Photo Festival 2026
Featured in Der Greif Issue 15 curated by Shirin Neshat, Der Greif online, 20TAL issue 9, Artnotes.se, Sydsvenskan, Dagens Nyheter, Deutschlandfunk, Elle Magazine, Sveriges Radio, Daily Lazy
Riding a bike, singing, or going to a soccer match. Everyday activities for most people but not for women in Iran. In the exhibition Not a Typical Persian Girl, artists Atoosa Farahmand and Oscar Hagberg highlight a highly topical subject: how the path for women towards greater freedom and greater participation in society has been severely restricted in Iran after the 1979 revolution. In the decades before the revolution, the women’s movement in Iran had made important strides. The right to vote and to take their rightful place in various contexts was improved, and more and more doors opened in society. But after the revolution, a series of laws once again limited women’s rights in the public arena, a crucial shift that laid the foundation for a gender-segregated reality where women were gradually deprived of basic freedoms.
“The title Not a Typical Persian Girl describes the irony of being ‘non-typical’ in a society where ‘typical’ is defined by oppressive ideology and politics. The ‘non-typical’ girl is in fact an ordinary woman in Iran, who in her everyday life is constantly forced to take risks and resist for their right to a free life.”
Atoosa Farahmand and Oscar Hagberg are known for their multidisciplinary approach that interweaves performance, photographic storytelling, and installations, basing their work on their artistic research on women’s history in Iran from 1850 to the present day. They use staging and experimental working methods to explore identity, transformation, and resistance, and they create art that invites audiences to reflect on political and social conditions. In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition, Farahmand and Hagberg are also releasing a new book of the same name, in which their research into women’s rights, historically and in the present, is interspersed with photographs and interviews in which women and non-binary individuals from Iran and the diaspora speak from their perspectives.
“The title Not a Typical Persian Girl describes the irony of being ‘non-typical’ in a society where ‘typical’ is defined by oppressive ideology and politics. The ‘non-typical’ girl is in fact an ordinary woman in Iran, who in her everyday life is constantly forced to take risks and resist for their right to a free life.”
Atoosa Farahmand and Oscar Hagberg are known for their multidisciplinary approach that interweaves performance, photographic storytelling, and installations, basing their work on their artistic research on women’s history in Iran from 1850 to the present day. They use staging and experimental working methods to explore identity, transformation, and resistance, and they create art that invites audiences to reflect on political and social conditions. In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition, Farahmand and Hagberg are also releasing a new book of the same name, in which their research into women’s rights, historically and in the present, is interspersed with photographs and interviews in which women and non-binary individuals from Iran and the diaspora speak from their perspectives.
Fotografiska, Stockholm
Fotografiska, Stockholm
alpha nova & galerie futura
Baerum Kunsthall, Oslo
June 2025
Open Art, Örebro
Jönköping
Redan, Malmö, Sweden
Hinterland, Vienna, Austria
Misschiefs, Stockholm, Sweden
International Women's Day, Jönköping Rosendalsbadet