Equality Now’s Adolescent Girl’s Legal Defense Fund seeks to prevent and address violations of the rights of girls, it is critical that institutional systems, including laws and policies and mechanisms to enforce them, are properly established and that the special circumstances and needs of adolescent girls are taken into account in designing and implementing such systems.

Shiva Ahmadi’s practice borrows from the artistic traditions of Iran and the Middle East to critically examine global political tensions and social concerns. Having come of age in the tumultuous years following the Iranian Revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Ahmadi moved to the United States in 1998, and has been based in California since 2015.

Ahmadi works across a variety of media, including watercolor painting, sculpture, and video animation; consistent through her pieces are the ornate patterns and vibrant colors drawn from Persian, Indian, and Middle Eastern art. In her carefully illustrated worlds, formal beauty complicates global legacies of violence and oppression. These playful fantasy realms are upon closer inspection macabre theaters of politics and war: watercolor paint bloodies the canvas, and sinister global machinations play out in abstracted landscapes populated by faceless figures and dominated by oil refineries and labyrinthine pipelines.

***ALL proceeds from sales in March 2024 of this product will be donated to Equality Now to support and promote legal equity and equality for young girls throughout the world.