In Summer 2025, we will present Iranian multidisciplinary artist and writer Kasra Jalilipour’s first large-scale exhibition, ‘Gut Feelings 2.0’.
Image courtesy of Kasra Jalilipour, 2025.
‘Gut Feelings 2.0’ is an exploration of ‘queer’ lives and rebellions in 19th Century Iran, which have been purposefully hidden away from the public consciousness. Although at times, queerness has played a key and obvious role in Iranian art and literature, societal structures have ensured its erasure from historical memory, despite always having existed in the culture.
Taking inspiration from Qajar art, literature, fashion and the lives of historical figures during the Qajar era in Iran, such as Tahirih Ghorrat-ol-ain (1817-1852) a martyred women’s rights activist, famous poet, and theologian of the Bábí faith. This body of work creates a speculative archive of people who have always existed and need to be remembered.
The installation focuses on rituals within homosocial spaces created by and for women. Exploring the potential for religion and superstition as safe havens for queerness and alternative forms of love to thrive. A possibility lost to Iranian culture due to the modernisation and westernisation of the country. The histories of homosocial activity become a window to imagining what queerness may have looked like, and how these segregated communities allowed spaces for queerness to exist. Working almost through an anti-archive, and anti-history approach, ‘Gut Feelings 2.0’ plays with the concept of time, merging the past, present and the future.
Taking into account the lives of gender marginalised people during the Qajar era, fictional narratives are drawn to reimagine queer histories and lives. Jalilipour’s research is based on the history of shrines and relics, specifically shrines built for female saints, and how they provide communities for women, focussing on common religious histories across medieval central Asia and Europe.
Jalilipour creates speculative characters, in collaboration with queer and trans Iranian artists in the diaspora; Sorour Drabi, Sevin Shabankareh, and Priscillia Kounkou-Hoveyda. Each has been cast to create new figures that will feature in the show, alongside newly commissioned creative writing from each of them, responding to the concept of queer ancestry.
The body of work utilises moving image, 3D animation, sculpture and installation, to re-portray the lives of women and gender non-conforming people of pre-Western Iran, enquiring how fragments of truth may provide the answers for the future of queer liberation in Iran.
Expanding on Jalilipour’s terminology “Fragments of truth and fiction”, to explore ethics within archives and the historical erasure of queer people and those most oppressed in society within them, the multi-sensory installation questions how art can create archives anew, blending fact and fiction, allowing the line between the two to become blurred in the process.