The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is proud to present Ingress, a photopoetry exhibition that brings together street photography from Iran and translations of classical Persian poetry in a layered encounter between image and verse, tracing women’s embodiment across public space and literary memory.

Sasan N. Chegini has photographed women in public spaces before and after the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom) uprising in 2022. Woman, Life, Freedom is one of the most significant women-led civil rights movements in Iran’s recent history. It was sparked by the death of Mahsa Zhina Amini, a young Iranian woman, in morality police custody following an alleged hijab violation.

While formal systems of control remain largely in place, with no meaningful reforms to civil and human rights, Chegini’s photographs from before and after the uprising reveal a visibly transformed cityscape. Women move through streets, sidewalks, and crowded public spaces, simply going about their daily lives. Yet under surveillance and state pressure, these ordinary acts of presence carry a different weight.

In Iran, where the camera has long been used to police and criminalize women, these photographs are anything but ordinary street images. Made quickly and under risk, they carry the urgency of their conditions, turning everyday moments into acts of presence and witness. Describing his process, Chegini writes, “I walk, draw close to people, raise the camera for the briefest moment possible, and release the shutter. Usually, the photograph is ready before I am able to compose my thoughts.”

In Iranian culture, poetry holds a central place, with classical verse living in cultural memory, rituals, and everyday speech. Drawing on this living tradition, the exhibition’s curator, Maryam Ala Amjadi, has placed Chegini’s photographs alongside verses she has selected and translated from a millennium of Persian literature that invoke the female body. Together, image and poem deepen the idea of the body as a site of encounter, struggle, and desire within Iranian cultural memory and lived experience.

The title Ingress draws from classical Persian poetry, where hair appears as a threshold, an entry point, and a site of rupture. Here, hair becomes a charged metaphor for the female body in public space, not as the sole site of struggle, but as a visible point through which broader questions of women’s and human rights come into view. Through image and verse, Ingress situates contemporary Iranian women within literary and lived histories of negotiating agency, visibility, and public presence.

Ingress: a Photopoetry Exhibition will be on view in the WorkShop Gallery of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art from August 25–December 12, 2026. An opening reception will take place from 5–8 p.m. on Friday, August 28. The Marjorie Barrick Museum is open from Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. It is closed on state and federal holidays. Entry is free. This exhibition is co-sponsored by Black Mountain Institute.

About Sasan N. Chegini Sasan N. Chegini is an Iranian photographer and translator whose work documents Iran’s sociocultural landscape. His photographs have been exhibited at Avay-e Honar Gallery (Tehran, Iran). They have been published alongside investigative articles in the Tehran Times Daily and in the Polish art and literary journal eleWator. Alongside his photography, Chegini has translated news, literary, and cultural writing for Persian-language publications and is the translator of two books.

About Maryam Ala Amjadi Maryam Ala Amjadi is an Iranian writer, translator, and researcher. She is the author of two poetry collections, a poetry chapbook, and the translator of a selection of Raymond Carver’s poems into Persian. She won the ‘Young Generation Poet’ Prize in the inaugural Yinchuan International Poetry Festival in China and was a writer-in-residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her debut short story, “The Ice Seller of Hell,” won the 2024 Elizabeth Alexander Award and was published in Meridians (Duke University Press). Ala Amjadi was previously a writer for the Tehran Times Daily, where she founded and wrote a weekly page dedicated to Iran’s sociocultural nuances. In 2017, she earned a joint PhD in interdisciplinary literary studies as an Erasmus Mundus fellow from the universities of Kent (UK) and Porto (Portugal). Her poems and translations of contemporary Iranian poets have been anthologized internationally, and her poetry has been translated into multiple languages. Her most recent book, Where Is the Mouth of That Word? (Selected Poems) was published by Poetrywala in 2022. Ala Amjadi is currently a City of Asylum Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. Ingress is her first curation.