eye love you

The focus is only on eyes. Every painting in Shirin Aliabadi's latest work features pencil-on-paper drawings of eyes. The eyes are accentuated with bright eye shadows and decorated with glitter, diamantes and elaborate designs of flowers, birds, butterflies and other motifs from Iranian poetry and art.

Aliabadi has presented the artworks as doodles drawn by a schoolgirl in her notebook while daydreaming in class about life, love and her uncertain future.

The series is playfully titled Eye Love You and the theme is further echoed in the titles of the drawings such as Eye dream of you, Eye miss you, Eye want to be a star and Eye want to matter.

The drawings and their captions appear light-hearted and whimsical. But these eyes are the windows on the soul of a troubled people. The drawings and their titles convey the thoughts and emotions of a restless generation and make a strong statement about contemporary society in Tehran. Aliabadi graduated in art history and archaeology from the University of Paris and now lives in Tehran.

The artist, whose preferred medium is photography, is interested in exploring the cracks created within monolithic oppressive societies such as today's Iran by the emergence of small subcultures such as the growing number of young Iranian women who fanatically ape Western ideas of beauty and "cool" behaviour.

Her previous work includes Girls in Cars, a series of snapshots of Iranian girls in party make-up and clothes, stuck in Tehran's notorious traffic; and Miss Hybrid — a series of studio shots of hip young Iranian girls sporting coloured contact lenses, platinum blonde hair and vibrant chadors, posing with telephones and other props.

Eye Love You is Aliabadi's first international solo exhibition. And once again, through the heavily made-up eyes, she has highlighted the idea of aestheticism accepted in today's Iran and the extent to which young women are willing to go to conform and be aesthetically acceptable. The eyes in her drawings may seem over the top but they are actually replicas of the make-up you see on fashionable brides and bridesmaids in today's Tehran.

"While working on the Miss Hybrid project, I visited many beauty salons and shops selling beauty products and that is how I became familiar with the new trends in our country. I was amazed to see the phenomenal scale of weddings in Tehran and realised just how big the wedding business is here and how important make-up, especially eye make-up, is. No matter how fancy your car is, how rich your husband is, how perfect your (cosmetically designed) nose is, how blonde your hair is and how lavish your bridal gown is — if your eyes and make-up are not hot, you are just not happening," says Aliabadi.

As an artist and social commentator, Aliabadi was keen to explore this social phen-omenon and hence decided to work on this series. But after meeting some popular eye make-up artists, she soon realised that photography would not work here.

"The great thing about photography is that you do not have to create an illusion as in painting or drawing. You just point your camera and press a shutter and you capture reality, which is always stranger than fiction. But I found that many of the make-up artists do not put their designs on paper but directly on to the skin. So this time, my idea was in someone's head and I could not photograph that. I had to find that someone to draw what they were thinking. So I collaborated with the designers and we produced some drawings.

"As I looked at these drawings, they reminded me of the little scribbles and sketches we all did in our notebooks, while dreaming in a boring class at school. The drawings looked like psychological profiles of young girls and that is where the idea to present this series as sketches in a schoolgirl's notebook came from," she says.

The series is supported by a poem that includes the titles of the paintings. With lines such as "Eye want to be famous. Eye want a hybrid car. Eye want everything. Eye want to forget you. Eye want to be happy. Eye want to fly. Eye want to be free. Eye want to matter. Eye want to give. Eye am a teardrop. Eye am the ocean. Eye am a burning candle", the poem seems to be simply a young girl's dreams and fears written in her diary.

But like the eyes, these sentences too have a deeper significance. The flamboyant eyes portray the way in which modern Iranian women rebel against the confines of their conservative society by adopting Western codes of beauty.

And disguised as random thoughts scribbled by a naïve youngster, the titles and poem convey the suppressed desires, insecurities, confusion, frustration, angst and hopes of young Iranians.