16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, AL (Here/There, Then/Now), 2010 Motevalli, an Iranian-American, created this work in response to the 2009 presidential election in Iran. That election is now widely seen as a charade designed to give the illusion of a democratic process while reporting fraudulent results to reinforce existing government control. The entire Here/There, Then/Now project was exhibited in Tehran, and therefore could not directly critique the existing regime. Instead the artist used the images and stories of the African-American civil rights struggle as a stand-in for the current fight of the Iranian people against an authoritarian regime. The image stitched into this banner depicts the shattered stained glass windows of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that was bombed by white supremacists in 1963.
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