Maryam Najd
Layers of the Self
Trained as a miniature painter in Tehran and living and working in Antwerp since 1992, Maryam Najd has developed a highly individualised visual language rooted in two ancient cultural traditions: Persian and Western. Her work evokes a critical but respectful dialogue between these two worlds. Gender, sexuality, femininity, nationality, origin and the politics of the body are recurring themes in the series of paintings she has produced over the past decades. The underlying questions remain: Who am I in this world? As a person? As a woman? As an artist?
I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent in Maryam Najd’s studio over the past few years. Looking at documentation and research material, discovering works in progress, discussing the topics she deals with, watching series grow, painting after painting, trying to understand her artistic struggles, admiring the stubbornness with which she persists in achieving her goals. From her early works to the present day, I have witnessed the growth of an artist who is above all concerned with the mastery of painting, refusing to choose between the purely abstract and the purely figurative. At a time when the world is obsessed with identity politics, her work questions not only the (Western) utopian ideal of freedom, but also the potential of art as a means of resistance.
MN: (Maryam Najd) When I was young, I just wanted to be a painter. I wanted to create a certain style, to interpret the medium, to reveal the aesthetics, the colours, the texture, the brushstrokes. I wanted to challenge myself and become a great artist. But the older I got and the more I developed, the more questions arose. It is only human, you become critical of your surroundings, you are confronted with many things; you start to ask yourself why you choose certain subjects in your work. Since leaving my country, I have realised that wherever I go in the world, my features, the colour of my hair, my appearance say something about me. First, I became a foreigner. And from the moment it becomes clear that I am from Iran, I am immediately associated with terrorism and oppression. The confrontation with my own nationality made me wonder: Who would I be if I were born in Europe? Or what if I were from Iraq, Syria or any other Middle Eastern country associated with terrorism? So even though I was not necessarily interested in making a statement through my art, it became political because of the themes I chose and my background.
KW: (Kathleen Weyts) Is it an issue, yes or no, to be considered an Iranian painter after all these years of living and working in Europe?
MN: Most people like to give you a label: Iranian, Muslim, black,… The first question I usually get is: Where are you from? I’m used to it. My parents are originally from Iran and have lived there for most of their lives. I was born, raised and educated there. If that were not the case, I would probably make very different work. But it’s not just about the content. My themes are influenced by the way I look at society, how I react to what is happening around me. But the style I create is first and foremost about painting, about expressing myself in an art form. I want to be appreciated for my skills, not just for the subject or my background.
KW: In January, you will start your doctoral research project ‘Within the Pale’ at UHasselt on censorship in art. You told me that you don’t want to approach your subject purely as a repressive tool. Can you explain?
MN: Historically, censorship has been seen as harmful, but certain regimes argue that forms of censorship are necessary to maintain public safety. The French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his book Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975), takes a different view when he says, and I quote, ‘We must stop once and for all describing the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes,” it “represses,” it “censors,” it “abstracts,” it “masks,” it “conceals.” In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that can be gained from him are part of this production’. Like Foucault, I’m more interested in looking at censorship and resistance from a productive perspective and from a constructive dimension.
KW: When I look at your work, that’s hardly surprising — it gets to the heart of your practice. Over the past years we’ve been talking a lot about how you install (sub)conscious mechanisms of self-censorship in your approach to painting.
MN: For me, it’s so much more than a PhD. At a certain point I realised how censorship and self-censorship were controlling everything: my subjects, my way of painting, covering my paintings in layers for so many years. So, I finally decided to do some research on the subject. Why do artists censor themselves? Why are we afraid to stand up and express ourselves freely, even if we live in a society that won’t put you in jail for it? I grew up in a culture that was always about control.
KW: You were also brought up to veil. I remember that beautiful work of sensual exposure of the female body from the series Accuracy and Balance — West (2014), in which you address the friction between freedom, eroticism, playfulness and exploitation, and for which you also used layering techniques.
MN: Yes, layering my paintings is a way of dealing with that. I was brought up to be covered up, to be censored, to be silent, to be quiet and to let go. It’s a big effort to let go, and that’s what I want to talk about. About the fact that you end up locking yourself in a prison, you stop thinking and speaking freely or allowing yourself to consider what your imagination can bring you — it frames you, also when you cross the border. You may find small ways to escape, but even if you take a small step, you are very aware of what that step is. With this research I want to give a voice to artists who have experienced this and who have had the courage to express themselves and find solutions to give form to their ideas, sometimes in a symbolic or hidden way. And I hope to find a way to regenerate the censorship they faced in my own work. I believe this will allow me to overcome my own self-censorship.
KW: Finding different ways of expressing yourself — even through censorship — becomes a power, is that it?
MN: Yes, being in a society that puts pressure on you, that controls everything, the way you dress, your ideology, your religion… it requires you to find extra strength within. As an artist, you must go even deeper, to find out how to get your message out. And like many things in life, the harder it gets, the more you can appreciate it, the richer it becomes. I want to show that censorship doesn’t have to silence everyone, maybe it gives way to a powerful response, a form of art that is even more appreciated than when you have total freedom to do whatever you want.
KW: You studied miniature painting in Tehran. Do you remember your first encounter with Western art?
MN: We had this international film festival every year; one year they showed a film about Van Gogh. He was one of the artists who was not censored at the university, and they gave us some texts and pictures of his work. The film really touched me, maybe that’s why I became so attached to colours. He is one of the artists who influenced me a lot at that time. My brother was living in Antwerp in that period, and my parents went to visit him. My father, who encouraged me to become a painter, was so overwhelmed by the work of Rubens that he secretly brought me a catalogue of his paintings. I was shocked by all the nudity, but maybe that’s why I wanted to paint nudes later. When I came to Europe myself, the first two things I had to do were go to Amsterdam to see Van Gogh and to the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp to see Rubens and the old masters. I still remember how the pictures I knew from the catalogue suddenly became real to me. I could see the brushstrokes and feel the touch on the canvas. And both times I cried.
I want to show that censorship doesn’t have to silence everyone, maybe it gives way to a powerful response, a form of art that is even more appreciated than when you have total freedom to do whatever you want.
KW: How has it influenced you as a painter?
MN: So many things influenced me when I came here. It was so powerful, like a tsunami. It completely confused and blocked me. There was too much going on in my head and for a while I couldn’t paint. I ended up doing terrible work. I was at the academy, and I asked my parents to send me a ticket back home. When I arrived, I just went out and bought an easel, paints and a lot of canvas. I made a lot of frames and took them out into nature, into the mountains. I went every day, and I thought: Forget everything, I’m just going to paint landscapes now. I had to go back home and do that, just to be able to paint again. And then I was ready to face a new reality. I realised that these old masters had paved a way but that I had to find my own. And in my third year at the academy, I started questioning the teachers and the people around me; by the end of the year the situation had become quite critical. But the painter Fred Bervoets, who was one of our teachers, understood me and he defended me in front of the jury. He stood up and said: ‘You will not stop her from pursuing her studies. She must continue’. And so I did.
KW: You’re a teacher now. What do you say to your students when you see them struggling?
MN: We don’t need another copy of an old master: the masterpiece is already there. What we want is something original. But how do you be original? Is it possible now, after such a long history of painting? I encourage them to express what is inside without forgetting that history.
KW: Do you feel that you are finally taking your rightful place within that history?
MN: Yes, I do. The idea of working on censorship started with Aesthetics of Sin (2018), a series about nudity. I remember getting a lot of negative criticism when I showed those paintings. People said, Why bother with this subject? Nudity has been solved, at least in the West; there are no more boundaries when it comes to the naked body. Well, I don’t agree, maybe there are some places like parts of beaches where you can go topless and naked, but how many places in the world can you be completely naked? And how many places in the world are there where women are killed for showing their hair? The ignorance of people who refuse to look beyond their own borders inspires my work. Just because you’re in a comfort zone doesn’t mean that everyone lives the same. Is the problem really solved? I censor myself because I am still afraid to stand up, like the protesters in Iran. I’m in a safe place. And the question is: can I do the same? Can you? Will we be able to in the future? I was still covering these paintings with a layer. After the lockdown, I decided to really allow myself to go beyond self-censorship and address issues that could open this new approach, both in terms of content and technique.
KW: You created three new series: ‘Colour-Blind Society’ (2022—2024), about racial and gender inequality through the lens of cultural hegemony in modern society; ‘Nation Wide Protest’ (2023), inspired by the women’s rights protests in Iran in 2022 that erupted after the arrest of Mahsa Amini for improperly wearing her hijab, which led to her death by police brutality; and the most recent series, ‘Seven Shades of Blood’, in which you take your skills a step further, enclosing the image in a wide painted border of colour, abstraction and geometric shapes, narrowing our focus. For years, you’ve developed your practice in both abstract and figurative painting; now you seem to have found a way to bring both styles together in a single painting. And — you’ve switched from oil to acrylic. You told me it’s a very different energy that you’re working with now. How would you explain this evolution?
MN: I’ve always been interested in both abstract and figurative painting. I could never choose between the two. Some people only appreciated my abstract works and others preferred the figurative ones, but for me it was always like someone saying: I like this part of you, but not that part. I find figurative painting very meditative, especially when the measurements get smaller and smaller. The way your hand and eyes move and work, the focus and control, it requires a very different approach. Working abstractly is much more physical and your thinking also becomes very abstract. You imagine a certain idea, a certain feeling that has nothing to do with reality. Using acrylics is also very different from oil painting, especially when you use the miniature technique. With oils, the picture acquires a certain depth through layering, whereas with acrylics it becomes flatter, the figurative atmosphere is somewhat dissolved, and I like that. With the new series, I also decided to leave out the layer that I used to put on the painting. And it’s as if I’ve freed myself from the whole idea that I created for myself when I came to Belgium of applying multiple layers as a kind of self-censorship of the painting. Now the subject is more open, more visible. During my research I came across the stories of Sarah Baartman and Oto Benga, victims of the slave trade and the phenomenon of human zoos, respectively, evils that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bringing this violent history back into our time confronts us with racial and gender inequality through cultural hegemony in modern society.
KW: It might also raise the provocative question of whether all these glamorous, good-looking people on our social media are not also prisoners in another kind of human zoo, one that we put ourselves in without realising it.
MN: Exactly, to what extent are we free and allowed to express ourselves? Our modern appearance masks our ignorance. While working on this series, it made sense not to separate the abstract and the figurative, but to bring them together. That’s how the frames began to find a place on the canvas. And then the colours of the flags and the flowers as national symbols found their way in too. All the ideas I’ve developed over the past few years come together in these works.
KW: The most recent series, ‘Seven Shades of Blood’, is inspired by the twelfth-century Persian epic Haft Peykar by the poet Nizami Ganjavi. You have turned it into a contemporary parable, a cycle of seven colours, from black to white, Saturday to Friday, across different continents and celestial bodies. The paintings remind me of something Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said at the launch of her book Americanah: ‘my hair grows up, not down’. Women’s hair and the way it is worn is far more political than we often realise. It can be about social status, acceptance, oppression, power… And wigs are a kind of hijab that hides what is underneath.
MN: Wigs — and hair — carry culture. When I started painting the series ‘Nation Wide Protest’ about the Iranian girls who were killed in the protests and the women who responded by cutting their hair, I suddenly understood how powerful this act is. Faces make us recognisable — and identifiable. In a country like Iran, this means you can be tracked you down and thrown into prison. In response, I asked the question: What if the face was erased and only the hair remained? Would it carry your identity or not?
I got inspired by the multiculturalism of Haft Peykar, which can literally be translated as ‘Seven Portraits’, but it’s often translated as ‘Seven Beauties’. The poem is about growing as a person, and the seven women who enabled the king to attain wisdom. I grew up with this poetry and other Persian literature that talks about human transformation, both material and spiritual. What is beyond the body and the mind? That’s part of who I am; I’m striving to become a more spiritual being, to reach that higher level. On the other hand, I realise that we are so caught up in the moment that I sometimes wonder if this goal is not naive. Reality shows us so much aggression, so much ugliness. We all watch the news, most of us know what is going on and we accept it. We accept that there are so many countries, so many places in the world where people are dying every day, every night. And we go on. We just live. We’re happy to be in a safe place. But what if tomorrow we’re not?
