Mariam's Greatest Masterpiece

The incredible life story of Mariam Salimian in the Islamic Republic of Iran

I want to tell you about a miracle that was called Mariam.

She was a self-made young artist in Iran. Her art is remarkable (you can see her portfolio here), and the artist, Mariam herself, is one of the most impressive people I’ve learned about in my life. And it so happened that she lived one street away from where I lived in Iran and that she was friends with one of my dearest friends, Rana. I never got to know her in person, but after learning who she was, I have no doubt we would’ve become best friends. Even though she is no more, I feel richer and happier to have learned about her. And so will you, when you read this article.

In a sense, anyone can take a glance and see a talented and successful artist. That much is obvious. But there is much more to her than meets the eye.

I spent most of my life in Iran. I intimately know the country from experience and research. And I get weak in my knees whenever I think of the monsters she slayed to become the person she was. She built herself in one of the most inhospitable societies for building and valuing anything in general, and art in particular. Iran, next to North Korea, is one of the most impossible environments for building a healthy life.

It feels almost impossible to adequately explain the environment. You have to have lived in Iran to know how the Iranian dictatorship mangles your capacity to care about anything. It does so by a thousand big and small cuts.

If you travel to Iran and get to watch people’s lives closely, you’ll be shocked by the general level of stillness. The modern, idealistic half of Iranian youth are all paralyzed because Iran kills anyone who does not strictly abide by the Islamic dictatorship’s ultra-religious way of life. The other half avoids Islamic dictatorship’s wrath by living like monks, thinking and feeling as little as possible, and giving up the wish to do anything in particular. It is a depressing scene. Everyone is stagnant in a closed country, thrown in a corner, split and sanctioned off from the entire world, while the Islamic revolutionary militias slowly consume everything and fund wars in the Middle East.

Now you can imagine my shock when I saw Mariam for the first time. I saw a girl who, despite her deep concern with the dire situation in Iran, was essentially radiantly active and happy. Happy with the life she worked doggedly to build for herself.

How did she earn her happiness in such a dystopian country? It was not privilege or luck. Let’s go through some of the barriers that she had to deal with:

She loved painting. But her work (and meaningful art in general) has no place in a dictatorship (except in service of propaganda). All art and writing in Iran is illegal unless permitted by the Islamic Guidance Ministry.
That has deterred millions, but not Mariam. She refused to let the dictatorship restrict her artistic judgment. In fact, she was so fearless and unaffected that she drew, unapologetically, naked women flaunting their breasts in Iran(!), a place where even human hair is considered too provocative and criminal to show.

Her art was extremely illegal and dangerous to own. And the dangers were real: Iranian intelligence raided the house of a friend of mine named Parsa and tortured him for days because they suspected him of drawing naked men in his spare time. He lived in Esfahan, the same city where Mariam and I lived.

She did not do so in ignorance of the laws or because she was clueless about the punishments. She took the risk because she loved art. “Art,” she wrote, “does not need permits and will not bow to vulgarity. It will simply find its way over you” [reacting to the news of the Islamic Guidance Ministry shutting down a private art gallery].

She had the power to keep going and reach excellence. I know she was harassed by both uncivil men and the Guidance Patrol (a.k.a. Morality Police). But she kept on going, whereas I know many girls who ended up defeated and cynical after such daily traumatic encounters. It is extremely hard to want to build, knowing that your society is decaying and receding culturally and economically under a dictator’s boot every year. It is so hard to not have a role model, to see no one around you who reached happiness. It is so painful to see the defeated faces of people crushed under grueling poverty and keep yourself going on.

The Islamic dictatorship did everything from indoctrination to mandatory veiling to force her to be an obedient caged virgin. She said to hell with that! Her parents disapproved, so she gained independence by working (in her words) “as a painting teacher, graphic designer, architect, language teacher and etc.” Somehow, she fought her way to being allowed to rent an apartment as a single girl. There was no one to teach Mariam nude painting. But instead of painting what she was taught, she found the resources and taught herself by asking friends to model for her nude. The dictatorship branded her art immoral and made them illegal. She couldn’t sell her art physically, so she learned to draw digitally. She lived in a sanctioned country, so she turned her drawings into NFTs (Non-fungible Tokens) and made thousands of dollars. She was born in one of the worst dictatorships in history, so she planned her way out of it. Against all odds, she made herself eligible for the Austrian artistic talent visa by perfecting her painting skills, along with mastering English and German.

It was not privilege or luck; it was agency. Her living power was simply stronger than the dictator’s (physical and psychological) weapons. She had the agency to get out of her bed, face the death threats of a dictatorship, and turn circumstance into competence. Both her choice to do it and the skill with which she did it are stunning.

[She was arrested and died two (or three) days after posting this video. Subtitles by me.]

I lived most of my life a street away from her home in Iran. I know only too well the environment and challenges we faced. And it was evident in her social media posts that she was dealing with the challenges I mentioned. Her social media posts exposed her contempt for the oppressive regime and her passion for life.

We can even see the day she chose to excel. Mariam had painted since she was a child, but she started to take it seriously on May 7th, 2018, when she posted a painting and announced: “I’m posting my paintings and won’t delete them this time because I want to build a portfolio that I love.”

You’ll see her rapid development ever since if you go through her Instagram page. She started by copying paintings, then copied real models, then painted a photograph-inspired picture of herself. Then Mariam was finally ready to create her own original creative paintings.

But there was one way that she was affected by the Islamic dictatorship. She could not be indifferent to the injustice and misery surrounding her.
On June 24th, 2018, Mariam wrote:

That moment when I saw that young child look at me with his broken self-esteem and said without looking into my eyes “please buy something from me, I beg you.” Or that moment when that soldier came and told me “Please, can I have one piece of your pizza? I haven’t eaten anything for days.” Or that moment when that old lady bent over, crawled on the ground and kissed my shoes just so I buy something from her.
I die every time I see scenes like this.
I hateeee, hateeeee what caused them. Not only because of that young boy, or that old lady, or that soldier.
But also because of myself. They’ve put me in a situation like this. I have to watch people live without self-esteem and dignity.

The Iranian Islamic dictatorship had deep effects on her which are visible in her paintings.

This one is named “Where is Justice?”

And this one is “Where is Freedom?”

She believed art should speak for itself. What do you think she was thinking?

The pain was personal. She even had lost one of her friends: “You killed my Baran [her friend’s name]. Today became one full year without her. ‘Damn’ is not a strong enough word for you.”

So she started to protest. And when Mahsa Amini was killed and the woman’s revolution [I will write a separate article on why I’m calling it a revolution] happened in Iran, Mariam defiantly joined the protests. She drew protest art, and she risked her life by walking unveiled on the streets of Iran.

mariamsalimian

A post shared by @mariamsalimian

Translation: “P.S.: If this scene bothers you, you must go to therapy.” Mariam was referring to the two things in this picture that are forbidden by Islam and illegal in Iran: her unveiled body and a dog.

For her activism, she was shadow harassed and threatened by Iran’s police. She wrote this two months before her death [Responding to someone who asked whether she is okay]:

I have my visa interview appointment soon and I don’t have internet. Others next to me have it but my internet is cut. I’m not sure if I can even go out to get to my interview. Some of these filths keep calling me to scare me and…
Don’t worry. I won’t answer them. Everything is messed up. No part of me is even close to doing well. But a part of me is as always ridiculously optimistic! Life is beautiful even though we keep seeing its ugly side. So many wonderful boys and girls are in this world. So it will be beautiful.
Don’t worry about me. I can live through any difficulty.

She obtained her visa and had a bright future ahead of her. She had so much to live for. Her last Instagram post was on January 1st, 2022. The news of her death came out on January 4th, 2022. This was one day before she could escape Iran forever (her visa start date).

The exact details of her death are not clear. The diaspora media reported that some say that she committed suicide after realizing she was banned from leaving the country. They also reported that her relatives told them they were under pressure to remain silent. I asked our mutual friend Rana and she too refrained from making comments due to fear. Everyone has been silenced and the facts have been suppressed.

But to me, the evidence is clear. She was murdered by the Islamic dictatorship.

Of course, one could imagine that she died a natural or accidental death. But that hypothesis is refuted by the independently verified fact that her acquaintances are under pressure from the police to remain silent. What ugly facts is the Iranian regime trying to hide?

Given that she was so excited about leaving Iran, my (and many others’) guess is that the Iranian intelligence saw her public Instagram post, and killed her before she could get out. Either by taking away her passport, as rumors say, or, as they did with many other brave young protesters, by a gruesome murder.

According to Sharia law, an Islamic government is God’s mission on earth. Therefore, anyone who protests against an Islamic government is an enemy of God, and their murder becomes warranted. That is the framework through which I understand Iran’s actions.

But if their goal was the preservation of the Islamic regime, it would have been easier for Iranian police to let her leave and have one less protester to deal with. Why did they have to do this to her? Is this how you would act if you believed in the mission of Islamic dictatorship? And what is that mission? Islamism has been tried for 45 years and the results have been disastrous for everyone. Then what is it that motivates and excites those fighting for an Islamic government? What we saw in the cases of Mariam Salimian, Mahsa Amini, Armita Garavand, Nika Shakarami [articles forthcoming], and October 7th is very damning. In none of those cases is there a way to interpret the Islamists’ actions as serving their ideals. What is their true motive?

It is because of people like Mariam that the disastrous ideology of Islamic government is fading away like communism did. For far too long, the majority of Iranian people were too blind and inert to see the true nature of their tyranny, and so have been complicit in their crimes. Now, the Islamic ideology is dying in Iran, its epicenter. And if we have a safer and more prosperous world after the looming fall of Islamism, we have people like Mariam to thank.

What did Mariam (and many other protestors) want? Just to be left free to live. Just to dispel this absurd idea that her life is to be sacrificed for someone else’s goals. All her life she was oppressed by Muslims. But instead of vengeance, she wanted equality.

She wrote in her last post just before her death: “Even if I’m now arrested and hanged, I will never say it was wrong to be free […]. I will say it was worth it. Even if it lasts for a day, an hour, or a minute.”

Even if she did not get to live a long, happy life, Mariam found serenity by rejecting the gruesome dictatorship of Iran. She experienced freedom psychologically before her death. That is why her death is not a complete tragedy. She loved life when she lived and found her freedom before she died.

Mariam’s obituary was posted by Rana (re-written to the best of my memory):

“My dearest Mariam, it’s been two years since you left us. I still have the urge to share with you every piece of art I see. Only to remember that your lovely way of seeing the world doesn’t exist anymore. So many times when I was about to give up, your existence gave me the fuel to go on. Now it has been two years and I’m still running on that fuel. I don’t know how to live without you. @mariamsalimian”

I promised Rana that I would tell the world about Mariam, and today, I fulfilled that promise.

Even though I’ve never seen you, Mariam, I love you. I have been fighting the feeling of gloom after losing you. Because part of me feels proud to know that you existed, and is triumphant that I got to tell your story to the world.

You said about one of your last paintings,

We had all the words in the world, but we could not say the right thing, we could not say anything.
Because there was always a word missing, "FREEDOM"
I wanted to fight for it and shout it.
So, I painted it!

I know what you meant, my comrade. I know why you loved freedom. And I will dedicate my life to the cause of advocating for a world where someone like you is free to earn her place at the top.

Click here to see more of her.

-Pouya Nikmand