Democracy

This project was created in response to the MOZAIK Philanthropy open call with the theme of “Democracy” and was selected as one of the featured artworks and recieved the honorarium award.

Badri was born and grew up in the shadow of the 1979 revolution in Iran and saw firsthand how the revolution became a miserable failure in achieving democracy.

Badri is the recipient of the 2022 Santa Fe Art Institute “Revolution”residency and has been focusing on revolutions, which in addition to Iran, include those in the Arab world called the Arab Spring. The revolts that toppled the leaders in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and spilled so much blood in trying to do so in Syria. With the exception of perhaps Tunisia, none of these revolutions resulted in more freedom. To the contrary, they created more misery and destruction and brought less freedom to the people.

In this painting Badri is trying to discover and explore the relations between dictatorships, democracies and the revolutions in the Middle East. Badri has viewed and analyzed a hundred pictures taken throughout the multiple revolutions in the Middle East and has transformed them into black and white forms on the canvas to create a unique view of each revolution, shown in each row of drawing, while projecting an overall view of the revolutions and their processes of overthrowing a dictator.

In this project, she is not trying to convey a particular message. Her main goal is experiencing democracy in the past and visualizing how it could be in future. She is hoping she will have fewer black patterns in her next democracy canvas.