This article by Bobby Ghosh is published by Bloomberg. Here is an excerpt:
If art, comedy and music have long been deployed in political causes, one of this year’s award-winning projects breaks new ground: It is a car.
The PaykanArtCar project has turned an Iranian-made sedan that was once gifted by Shah Mehammed Reza Pahlavi to the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu into a vehicle for activism against Iran’s rulers. The idea is to use the car as a canvas on which Iranian artists can protest the depredations of the regime in Tehran.
The first artist to have at it is Alireza Shojaian, an Iran-born, Paris-based artist who has chosen to draw attention to the plight of Iran’s LGBTQ+ community. Against a yellow background, Shojaian has painted images depicting Ali Fazeli Monfared, a 20-year-old man from Ahvaz, in southwestern Iran, who was allegedly beheaded last year by his own relatives for being gay. The style is redolent of the 10th century Persian epic known as Shahnameh, and the artist says he was especially inspired by one of its stories, the tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab, in which a father kills his son.
Read the full article here.
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