Rebel Rebel: Soheila Sokhanvari at the Barbican

Rebel Rebel, the first major UK commission by Iranian artist Soheila Sokhanvari, celebrates and commemorates feminist icons from pre-revolutionary Iran. The gallery exhibition is now showing at the Barbican until February 2023 and it is free to attend.

Sokhanvari transforms the Curve into a devotional space, populated with exquisite miniature portraits of glamorous cultural figures from Iran. The project spotlights the rarely told histories of these women, who pursued creative careers in a culture enamoured with Western style but not its freedoms.

Rebel Rebel explores the contradictions of Iranian women’s lives between 1925 and the 1979 revolution – an explosive period of both liberation and commodification that proved short lived. The exhibition is striking in scale and setting.

Borrowing from David Bowie’s 1974 cult pop song, Rebel Rebel pays tribute to the extraordinary courage of these female stars – who pursued their careers in a culture enamoured with Western style but not its sexual freedoms – and laments their fate, after the revolution in 1979 left them with a stark choice: renounce any role in public life or be forced into exile.