Iran’s protesters are painting for freedom

At first they tried performance art. Across Iran, young women and men crouched down, heads hanging in submission, arms cuffed to trees or lampposts. When the police began rounding them up, protesters padlocked mannequins bent double to street signs. In sports matches players adopted similar poses when they scored, re-enacting the fate of Khoda Nour, a protester the mullahs’ men tied to a flagpole without food or drink, a glass of water placed before him, just out of reach.

Then they switched from theatre to visual art. Two months after the death of a Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, arrested for showing her hair beneath her mandatory veil, protest art is changing cityscapes. Stencils of Amini and other women killed in the uprising plaster walls, rivalling the state’s ubiquitous murals glorifying martyrdom. Public fountains spew red dye, prompting the authorities to drain them. Stickers cover old street signs with new names. Ekbatan, a western suburb of Tehran, the capital, has been dubbed Arman after a young man shot dead in the protests. Demonstrators brandish the black flag of Islam mockingly cut into slivers like wavy hair. Girls in middle-class north Tehran sport a new style of handbag, with red splashes mimicking bullet wounds.