Through a collection of thirty narrative paintings, Maryam Safajoo portrays haunting episodes and shares detailed accounts from those directly impacted by or witnesses to persecution, repression, and injustice. This compelling book sheds light on the agonies endured by Bahá’ís in Iran – their sole crime steadfast adherence to a faith promoting equality of women and men, universal education, and the unity of humankind. Paintings are accompanied by written text in English and Persian.
“Maryam Safajoo’s paintings are tragic, seductive, original, poignant, and politically charged. She is of the Bahá’í Faith, one which has been treated with extreme brutality by the Iranian regime.
Her process involves in-depth interviews with Bahá’í people who have experienced this brutality. She then painstakingly paints their moving stories. She simultaneously charms us with her folksy, even faux naïve style and confronts us with the horrible reality of her subject matter.
This strategy adds great power to her work and makes her art complex, layered and nuanced. Her work is difficult yet accessible, serious without being somber, beautiful without being decorative, politically charged without being just didactic. The personal experiences of her subjects speak of one of the crucial moral tragedies of our time. Her work is filled with anger but also with love, which makes it complex and compelling.” — Gerry Bergstein, Faculty Emeritus SMFA at Tufts.
“Maryam’s paintings narrate the contemporary situation of the systematically persecuted Iranian Bahá’í community – Iran’s largest minority – after the 1979 Iranian revolution. While at first glance, her paintings of domestic subjects might be mistaken for cozy interior scenes and her landscapes for pastoral meditations, a second glance and then a longer look opens up something very different…” – Michelle Millar Fisher MFA Boston Curator May 2023
