Battleground

“Your body is a battleground” stayed with me while I made this work, five months after the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began, in a workshop in Iran.

This torso is cast in bronze, and its surface is covered with the soles of soldiers' boots, pressed four millimetres deep into the metal. The imprints speak of the kicks that have fallen on the heads and chests of women in Iran. This violence did not start with the movement; it ran through the years before it, and the uprising brought it into its most visible form.

The torso has no head and no complete limbs, so it belongs to no single woman, and to any of them. The prints overlap until no untouched skin remains. But bronze keeps what is pressed into it: the same metal that records the blow also preserves it, and shines.