Atena Farghadani, an Iranian artist and activist, has been detained after attempting to hang one of her works to the walls around the presidential palace in Tehran.
Her lawyer, Mohamad Moghimi, says Farghadani was ‘severely beaten’ during her arrest by intelligence officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards on 12 April and sustained facial injuries. Farghadani was protesting against ongoing harassment by the security forces that has curtailed her political artmaking – which mostly takes the form of satirical cartoons – and seen her exhibitions banned.
Refusing bail, Farghadani has now been transferred to Tehran’s notorious Evin, a prison dubbed ‘the university’ given the number of students, professors, writers and dissidents held there. The artist is no stranger to the facility: in 2014 she was kept in its cells for three months on charges of spreading propaganda, insulting members of parliament and insulting the Supreme Leader of Iran.
‘We call on the Iranian authorities to immediately and permanently cease their deliberate and brutal campaign against artistic freedom, and artists like Farghadani, and for the charges against her to be dropped immediately,’ Julie Trebault, managing director of Artists at Risk Connection, said in a statement.
