I am an Iranian painter living in Belgium. I studied Fine Arts during secondary school and Carpet feature’s design at university in my home land.

I have moved to Belgium in 2008 in order to be able to freely express my art in a democratic and secular country. When I was living in Iran, I have never felt good of being a woman. This feeling was related to the fact that as woman , I never had equal rights with a man.

Women were always considered as wives , daughters, sisters, mothers and so on, and have never been considered simply as independent and equal human beings with their own integrity , as men are.

This situation had made my life an everyday suffering and scarfed my most profound feelings, knowing that I was not even able to express or even discuss my distress with anyone.

This feeling has even followed me the few years after I have left my mother land. I have left with two choices, either to take a deep breath and shout out my suffering, projecting all my feelings under my brushes and into my paintings and to set myself free, or to suffocate with all my anger and despair.

I have chosen the first option, one day I have decided to take a very deep breath and to shout and shout , simply to feel myself alive and get back my sense of womanhood .

Since this day, I am using my art to express all the suffering and injustice that all women in patriarchal structures are bearing.

I try to portrait women issues and manifest my concerns with regards to women rights, hopping for an egalitarian society.

My aim and objective is to use my brushes, paint tubes an canvases as a peaceful and explicit weapon to fight against this systematic inequality toward women of my country and abroad.

As an immigrant painter, I express my fears, hopes, nightmares and dreams to demonstrate my feeling of alienation in a modern liberal society.

I try to share these feelings which are common among thousands and thousands of human beings. My paintings are the expression of women being born under oppressive and unequal societies, where they have to accept to live with pain and despair until they die.

Nearly every day, we do see and hear, suffering imposed on women all around the world, but quite fast, we all forget. My endeavor is to express these sufferings as well as my own feelings as a woman who suffered as an Iranian woman and more generally simply as a woman, by my paintings.

I do believe that art in general and paintings in particular, touch any human’s hearth and soul and will engrave these sufferings into their minds as a contrary to simply watching or hearing the news .

Saye Sohrabi