Arghavan Khosravi

Most of the faces on this sheet are concealed. The most prominent central figure disappears behind a cradled bomb; a pair of legs gently balancing on the weapon’s tip. This scene is layered over an enlarged scan of the artist’s expired Iranian passport. After former president Trump instated a ban on Muslims entering the US in 2017, Arghavan Khosravi began a body of work that explores the creation of narrative and gives agency to women. “My work is a vehicle for shifting power, validating personal storytelling, and connecting to universal messages about human rights,” she explains.

–Jan Howard, Houghton P. Metcalf Jr. Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

As an Iranian studying in the United States, I was directly affected by Trump’s executive order banning travel from Muslim-majority countries. I had just returned to Providence from a trip home when the order was signed. I responded to the ban by painting on the pages of my expired passport, choosing to emphasize or obscure elements of the documents with my own imagery. I later decided to explore this subject matter more by changing the scale of the passport. This approach entailed scanning and inkjet-printing passport pages almost ten times bigger. This helped the passport become defamiliarized as an object.