A History Felt in the Gut

On the eve of Nowruz, in 19th-century Qajar-era Iran, love between women could be formalised in secret. A ritual known as Sigheh Khahari—the sisterhood vow—involved a religious contract that permitted two married women to travel together without male accompaniment… so goes the account on paper. In practice, the rite sanctified intimacy through an exchange of gifts—sweets, jewellery, lace, and sometimes a wax or leather keepsake with a distinctly private use. A female molla presided, with this tray of shrines as a witness and totem of their shared devotion, shrouded in blessed technicality. This small glint of history, reframed in the research of scholar Janet Afary, was one of the several that laid the groundwork for multidisciplinary artist Kasra Jalilipour to begin building a new kind of archive. 

Born in Isfahan in 1995 and now based in Derbyshire, Jalilipour flits fluently between performance, moving image, installation, and text. Their practice is driven by a compulsion to reach into the absences of Iran’s historical record—deliberate vacancies where non-heteronormative peoples’ lives should be. They settle into the marginalia: the footnotes, photographs, and literature intimating phantom traces of the lives omitted by design. Guided by the grounding, tender tremor of their somatic intuition, Jalilipour sifts through it all, seeking to recover these latent histories with speculative storytelling, culminating in their upcoming show Gut Feelings 2.0. 

“It’s about going further than the reference and imagining how it can be brought to life…” Jalilipour says when they call in from their studio in Derbyshire, voice searching, tellingly at ease with uncertainty. “Instead of imagining what a trans person might have looked like in the 19th century, I was more interested in trans Iranians that I know now… and then imagining them in reference to history.”

Jalilipour’s education in Iran was moulded by a tension between rigid formalism and imaginative instinct. In school, calligraphy and geometry demanded exacting execution. At home, Jalilipour’s mother, a pastel artist, emboldened more fluid creativity. The rigid symmetry of Islamic geometry once felt at odds with Jalilipour’s instinct for the imaginative, but distance soon lent the practice a kind of emotional texture it never had when they moved away from home… “So I kind of rejected it at the time, and I think maybe in the past ten years I’ve been befriending it again.”

Gut Feelings 2.0 marks the second instalment of Jalilipour’s most expansive body of work to date. Commissioned initially by Trinity Square Video in Toronto in 2021, the project began as an exploration of historical figures sidelined in Qajar-era Iran—women like Tāj al-Saltaneh (1884-1936), a feminist royal and one of the rare few to leave behind a written account of her life. Through 3D animation, moving image, and narrative fabulation, Jalilipour sought to reimagine how alternative modes of love may have been experienced and perceived within a pre-Westernised Iranian context. 

For Jalilipour, the Qajar era is of particular interest, not least for its position on the brink of Western encroachment, a vantage that reveals what belonged to Iran’s cultural imagination before it was suppressed or reframed. During this period, the Shah and his entourage made repeated visits to London, where British officials bristled at gestures of affection between men. These sentiments soon travelled back to Iran, and casual intimacies like men kissing on the cheek or walking hand-in-hand began to recede into the twentieth century. It was these imported anxieties, Jalilipour suggests, that reshaped local norms. “Modernising meant westernising, and westernising meant losing things that were once acceptable in our culture, and that’s kind of these social intimacies.”

Their research draws from a constellation of sources, looking even to contemporary works like Persian television and the scholarship of historians like Afsaneh Najmabadi. The latter’s book, Women With Mustaches and Men Without Beards, remains what Jalilipour calls the “Bible” to their practice, particularly in its reading of gender ambiguity across Persian visual culture. There, youth and beauty evade modern categorisation altogether; women accentuate their monobrows and downy moustaches, while boys are prized for the delicacy of their beardless faces. “In a lot of the Qajar paintings, you see a figure of a man and a woman, and they’re really young, but there’s this androgyny because there’s either facial hair or lack of facial hair,” they elucidate. “I saw these paintings growing up, but I didn’t really understand what they represented.”

When confronted with a modern, Western gaze unable to accommodate or conceive of such aesthetics, these same traits often become objects of derision. In its first iteration, Gut Feelings centred on the afterlives of historical women bent by time, myth, and meme: “I was mainly focussing on how Qajar women were misrepresented online and how historical inaccuracy travels in this internet culture that’s obsessed with infographics, and how they can become quite racist and misogynistic, ” Jalilipour explains. The project included a twelve-minute video essay addressed to Tāj al-Saltaneh herself, who has become the subject of viral misinformation today—mocked for facial features once coded as beautiful, frequently misidentified by her elder sister’s extant portrait, and falsely credited with the mass suicide of thirty men supposedly undone by her charms. “I basically tried to explain the internet to her,” they add. “These memes sometimes resurface and people send them to me and they’re like, ‘Oh this is so interesting, and I’m like, ‘This is bullshit.’”

Using facial animation software, Jalilipour uploaded a portrait of Tāj and gave her expression—she blinked and met their gaze with a knowing smile. From there, the idea for the second exhibition took immediate shape, as if returning the look.  “We have this piece of history through photography but we want it to be more real, we keep wanting to bring back people from the past – the stasis of photographs isn’t enough anymore,” they say. “So I made a 3D bust of her that became another video animated work, and that’s where this 3D bust idea came from.”

Four new busts will be on show at their upcoming exhibition. One is of Tahirih Qurrat al-Ayn (1817-1852), a Babi poet, theologian, and women’s rights activist who was executed for her beliefs and is remembered as a saint. The remaining three were created by casting contemporary non-heteronormative Iranian artists: Sorour Drabi, Sevin Shabankareh, and Priscilla Kounkou Hoveyda. Each collaborator was invited to write a fictional reflection on fluid ancestry. These texts, recorded in audio, will play beside their sculpted busts in the gallery.

Drabi’s story unfolds in a hamman, shaped by references from the Iranian television show Jeyran and its fleeting depictions of gender nonconformity. Hoveyda, a Black-Iranian queer artist, drew on Victoria Princewill’s In the Palace of Flowers, a novel loosely based on the life of an Ethiopian woman enslaved in the court of Naser al-Din Shah (1831-1896). The character’s historical counterpart left behind only a paragraph of writing—one of the few known documents authored by a Black woman in nineteenth-century Iran. From these scant traces, Jalilipour found just enough footing to imagine the lives that would animate each bust, creating something porous and participatory. “To an extent, in terms of the desire that plays out in all of them, there’s a sense of autobiography; of looking within about who you are and your desires and then reflecting that on potential ancestors to creating this fictional character.”

Jalilipour’s hope is that these imagined lineages offer those dislocated by time or doctrine a way to recognise themselves within the historical record rather than outside of it. “There’s always this idea in the diaspora that we’re only this way because we can do it here [away from home], and not everyone thinks like this,” they consider. “I think maybe it’s a generational thing. But I think seeing these histories that we’ve made—they are fictional but I hope that it makes people understand that it’s always existed in our culture. And it still exists!”

The exhibition proposes that reclaiming history can begin with imagination, and that fiction, when handled with care, can reinstill a sense of belonging to those long estranged from our archives. It grants, at minimum, a foothold for the kindness of clarity. “Learning more about the history of gender and sexuality in Iran has made my upbringing and culture make more sense to me. You know when you’re growing up and you’re like ‘why, why is it like this?’ And your parents can’t give you an answer. I feel like this project has helped me understand at least why things are the way they are, and if we don’t know why things are the way they are then there’s no way that we can help change it.”

Gut Feelings 2.0 is on view at Grand Union, Birmingham, from June 6 to August 16, 2025.