Shahla Bahrami: Censorship and Autocensorship – I bite my tongue

In the hands of artist Shahla Bahrami, food and language are intimately fused. To create the striking photographs that make up her series Censorship and Autocensorship – I bite my tongue, Bahrami first writes fragments taken from her journal or canonic Persian poems onto ingredients or dishes typical to Iranian cuisine. She then stages and photographs these foods and their inked Farsi inscriptions against a dramatic black background. From this series, three images focusing on tea and spices are presented here.

Bahrami views this series as an exploration of power in which she symbolically links eating—typically considered a benign activity—with the fraught dynamics of control, violence, and suppression. She writes: “If speech takes the form of an opening, a gift, an extraction of oneself, eating is on the contrary the movement of a return to oneself, of a compression, of a disappearance into the flesh.” In this way, through the juxtaposition of food and the written word, Bahrami deliberates on the role of the individual and the collective in consuming the culture of others, limiting self-expression, and, as her title starkly indicates, the censorship of language and artistic creativity.

Despite their deeply disquieting underpinnings, these seductive images are equally imbued with Bahrami’s evident delight in Iranian gastronomical and intellectual traditions. They function thus as an elegant homage to these time-honoured practices. The series also offers brief windows into Bahrami’s own identity—crystallizing her deep appreciation for Iranian cuisine and culture while hinting opaquely at her own specific experiences as a diasporic woman and artist. Marked by her handwritten notations, these images oscillate subtly, artfully, between the genres of still life and self-portraiture.

Bahrami’s photographs are on view at Vancouver City Centre Station on the Canada Line.

The artist thanks the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Ottawa and Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain gallery for their support.