Atena Farghadani, an Iranian artist and activist, has been detained after attempting to hang one of her works to the walls around the presidential palace in Tehran.
Her lawyer, Mohamad Moghimi, says Farghadani was ‘severely beaten’ during her arrest by intelligence officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards on 12 April and sustained facial injuries. Farghadani was protesting against ongoing harassment by the security forces that has curtailed her political artmaking – which mostly takes the form of satirical cartoons – and seen her exhibitions banned.
Refusing bail, Farghadani has now been transferred to Tehran’s notorious Evin, a prison dubbed ‘the university’ given the number of students, professors, writers and dissidents held there. The artist is no stranger to the facility: in 2014 she was kept in its cells for three months on charges of spreading propaganda, insulting members of parliament and insulting the Supreme Leader of Iran.
‘We call on the Iranian authorities to immediately and permanently cease their deliberate and brutal campaign against artistic freedom, and artists like Farghadani, and for the charges against her to be dropped immediately,’ Julie Trebault, managing director of Artists at Risk Connection, said in a statement.
10 June: Atena Farghadani has been sentenced to six years in prison, her lawyer, Mohammad Moghimi confirmed on X/Twitter.
‘My client was sentenced to six years in prison by Branch 26 [of the court] on the charges of insulting holy [elements] and preaching against the regime,’ Moghimi writes. ‘Under the pretext of multiple crimes, this show court has delivered the harshest punishment in [relation to] the two mentioned charges.’
Farghadani was previously jailed from 2015-16 for drawing members of Iranian Parliament as monkeys to protest legislation against birth control and for a short period of time last summer, according to Artists at Risk Connection (ARC).
‘We are dismayed to learn that the Iranian activist, artist, and cartoonist Atena Farghadani has been sentenced to a total of six years in prison,’ an ARC statement writes. ‘The maximum penalties are indicative of the Iranian regime’s long-standing determination to persecute and silence this courageous rights defender.’
