The distance between Western news stories about Iran and the alternative realities disseminated by diasporic Iranian writers had been fuelling my interest for
years. For me, and millions internationally, some best-selling memoirs by female authors “lifted a veil” (so to speak) of ignorance about Iran and the situation of
women, intellectuals, and artists there, before and after the Revolution of 1979. Encouraging this awareness were my Canadian-Iranian friends who have a love
of dancing, traditional music, poetry, and delicious food, and who implored me to “visit Iran!” The dream became a plan after my discovery that Iran was the first MiddleEastern country to support photography
and photographic artists locally (rather than as colonial tourists), and that Iran has a rich history of photographic portraiture, revolutionary and war photography, and
contemporary lens-based art. Rose Issa’s book Iranian Photography Now (published in 2008) overturned the fact that previously Shirin Neshat was the only Iranian photographic artist whose name came
readily to mind. A visa application was made and granted, thus allowing me to visit Tehran for a glorious month during the summer of 2010. There, a network of friends and contacts made it possible for me to
meet some of Iran’s greatest photographic artists, researchers, and gallerists. Gender
and Exposure—the first exhibition of its kind in Canada—is the result of the collaboration of Iranian artists who so generously shared their work, as well as the
inspired Canadian artists at Gallery 44. In an attempt to advance the issues that have preoccupied the discourses of Middle Eastern art for the last decade (namely:
femininity, the veil, gender inequity, Islamic religious traditions, the calligraphic impulse, and revolutionary violence), this exhibition addresses the occlusion of
some—and alternatively, the exposure of other—gendered bodies in Iranian lens-based art. Gender is viewed here not as a singular or monolithic concept, but as a spectrum of possible identifications with and responses to culturally imposed
norms, which involve local, national, and transnational images and ideals, and produce shifting and hybrid identities. The chosen artists (who range from emerging
to senior, and who all live and work in Iran) shift the emphasis to: masculinity as well as femininity;

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