Threading the Gaze examines how visibility and sensibility are continually negotiated within apparatuses of bodily production. Drawing on images, primarily selfies, taken by Iranian women during the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement, Bozorgi traces circuits of exchange between human and non-human gazes, investigating who looks at whom, how one chooses to be seen, and who can be seen or remain unseen. 

Through printing images on silk, dismantling the fabric, and containing or enclosing images in frames and boxes, the work simultaneously reveals and obscures the threads that connect viewer, subject, material, and artist. To thread the gaze is to recognize these entanglements as relational and reciprocal. Bozorgi invites the viewer to participate in the process of Threading the Gaze by weaving in their own, engaging in the act of seeing and sensing, and experiencing the shared agency between the materials, subjects, and themselves.

Mona Bozorgi is an artist-scholar-educator whose interdisciplinary practice explores the entanglement of visibility and response-ability, emphasizing the interconnectedness of material and discursive forces in contemporary photographic practices. As an Iranian-born artist, her work confronts historical exclusions based on gender and provides alternative ways of understanding the contemporary self. This focus emerges from her early engagement with the complexity and challenges of representing women’s bodies in a religiously conservative society. Bozorgi’s recent work blends textiles, photography, and installation, troubles the traditional view of photographs as flat objects, and demonstrates the entanglement between the materiality of photographs and their meanings. Bozorgi holds a Ph.D. in Fine Arts with a focus on Critical Studies and Artistic Practice from Texas Tech University and an MFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She is an Assistant Professor of Photography in the Department of Art at Florida State University.

Threads of Freedom shares stories of Iranian women using the photographs they have taken of themselves during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising and protests in the country. I conceived the process of creating the work as a form of protest, a way to resonate with the struggle, to be affected by the work as much as I hope it affects the viewers. 

The images are printed on silk fabric, and threads are removed from the weft of the silk. Throughout history, fabric was utilized to simultaneously conceal, beautify, and objectify women’s bodies. In Threads of Freedom, fabric becomes a surface that reveals women’s bodies instead of covering them, and the threads of the fabric reweave their shared stories. The work acknowledges that the people’s history will remain despite the state’s attempts to censor or erase it.