“A Woman’s Odyssey” portrays the journey of a woman facing the harshest conditions, transforming herself to survive and nurture life. The jury was profoundly moved by the symbolic narrative and the powerful imagery of this handmade analogue animation. The goldfish, a symbol of life, embodies resilience as it carries a human embryo, embraced by the woman. This journey of struggle and rebirth resonates with the artists’ own experiences of being forced to leave Iran and their ongoing fight for freedom and expression in exile.
Jury Statement
In this story fish is a woman because she can grow a human in her womb. In fact, A Woman’s Odyssey is a symbolic narrative of a woman’s struggles and her journey to freedom. In this way, she dies many times and is reborn in a new form.
The influence of Iran’s ancient culture in the creation of this story cannot be denied, for example, the combination of human and animal in the creation of the main character. The author of A Woman’s Odyssey has written the initial form of the story as a poem years ago in Iran, but her experiences of immigration and especially the recent “Women-Life-Freedom” movement in Iran had a final effect on the story.
We see how living in the terror of war, discrimination, restriction and oppression under the heavy shadow of a dictatorial regime melts a person and finally changes them for survival.
Credits
Leila Samari: Story, Storyboard, Characters, Backgrounds
Maryam Sehhat: Animation, Sound, Edit
The presentation of the work is funded by State of the ART(ist), a collaboration between the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ars Electronica.
Leila Samari
Leila Samari, who is an Iranian artist living in Vienna, has a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from Tehran University of Art and Architecture. She immigrated to Austria in 2017. From 2001 onwards, she has had many solo and group exhibitions of her paintings in Iran and Austria. The pictures, stories, and poems that Leila has created are a narrative of experiences and feelings, dreams, and nightmares that she has experienced herself and that emerge unconsciously in her works. The artist uses portraits and human figures, sometimes combining them symbolically with animals to complete her narratives.
Maryam Sehhat
Maryam Sehhat was born in Iran, studied painting at University of Art and Architecture in Tehran and immigrated to Austria in 2017. From 2006 until now she had many solo and group exhibitions with her paintings in Iran and Austria. In her paintings she tries to show the physical and mental relation between humans and other creatures in a metaphoric way. In her imagination there is a world parallel to ours in which it doesn’t matter whether you are a human, an animal, or a combination thereof.
