are the special stories of Parvin, the artist, who depicts herself as Scheherazade and Medusa, who is threatened and threatening, who saves her life and the feminine world when she uses her guile, acts wisely and creatively, and weaves a few stories that allow us to consciously see processes in a time perspective, and thus control, moderate, channel and mediate the mythical archetypal forces in the soul and society. In this way she can be the master of her destiny against the power of the oppressive male culture that every woman must fight against today, a culture that originates, for Parvin, in her homeland – Iran.
The female figure here is, on the one hand, the mythical monster of the great animal goddess and on the other hand, a threatening female figure who fights it in order to retrieve her power. In contrast to the mythical model of the hero fighting the monster, here the main motif is the woman fighting, controlling, steering the monster, which is multi-faceted like a Chimera:
The inner impulses and urges, mythical archetypal forces of the Great Goddess, which arise from the collective unconscious.
The monstrosity of the overbearing and oppressive male society towards women.
In contrast to the submissive femininity, Parvin mobilizes the brave warrior power of the Amazon. At the same time, she carries within her the hard-working female qualities that weave for the world the tapestry on which she paints. She wrestles as a man but also embraces and blends as a woman.
Female nudity is a subversive motif when it appears on the carpet of the Iranian culture that oppresses women and obliges them to cover their bodies and faces. Nudity here is a feminist defiance against the oppressive culture. Nakedness means I am as I am, without shame in my physicality and without pretending.
This Scheherazade, in all the variations of the works here, is also the terrible Harpy bird, the female force that appropriates the fight against the monster, a fight that culture has allowed only for men. This is how the works all express the artist Parvin and above all, art in general. Art confronts the archetypal existence in the soul and in the world by reshaping it, controlling, and containing it and connecting the opposites.
The Persian carpet expresses the cultural tradition that favors weaving together geometric motifs (the masculine element) together with motifs of flowing lines such as branches, leaves and flowers from nature (the feminine element) and thus create contrasts. The carpet creates a stable and inclusive frame around the multitude of elements that are organized together in an orderly pattern with a center. In this sense it has the quality of the mandala, as a pattern of perfection held in the center, as a pattern of the soul and the universe. The carpet is also like a Great Mother woven into the fabric of humanity.
There is a gap between the symbolic meaning of the carpet as bridging the contrasts and the fact that today's Iranian tradition still oppresses femininity while it is the toil of the oppressed women that created the carpets. The culture is unable to realize the all-human symbolic meaning of the female and male connection that is waiting to be realized not only in the Far East but also in other cultures of the world.
Parvin is holding onto the cultural tradition that is embodied here by the Persian carpet and leans on it. On the other hand, she is struggling with it because of the oppressive masculine element in it. Parvin’s tendency is to connect the contrasts between the male and female soul as well as to live in peace with the complete physical, naked animal aspect, so that in the end, the naked woman will play with the whale and not be swallowed by it.
Ruth Netzer is a clinical psychologist, a Jungian analyst who combines art and psychology in her writing, a researcher of literature and cinema, an Israeli painter, and a poet.