Parastou Forouhar

Parastou Forouhar (Persian; پرستو فروهر) (born 1962) is an Iranian installation artist who lives in and works out of Frankfurt, Germany. Forouhar's art reflects her criticism of the Iranian government and often plays with the ideas of identity. Her artwork expresses a critical response towards the politics in Iran and Islamic fundamentalism. The murder of her parents, Dariush Forouhar and Parvaneh Eskandari (Forouhar), fuels Forouhar's work. Forouhar's work has been exhibited around the world including Iran, Germany, Russia, Turkey, England, and the United States.

Biography Early life and education The daughter of political activist Parvaneh Forouhar (née Eskandari) and politician Dariush Forouhar, Parastou was born in 1962 in Tehran, Iran. Parastou studied art at the University of Tehran from 1984 until 1990, where she earned her B.A. She then continued to study at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach am Main in Germany, and went on to earn her M.A. in 1994. This led Parastou Forouhar to dedicate her life to revealing the atrocities of the Iranian state through her expressive art. Despite it now being decades since the incident, the state intelligence still impedes her from holding a public commemoration for her parents. She has been threatened by the intelligence service several times, and was finally sentenced to six years of conditional prison in 2017.

Parastou lives in exile with her two children in Frankfurt, Germany. Her work has been widely displayed inside and outside of Iran.

Work Forouhar's work is autobiographical in nature and responds to the politics that have shaped and defined contemporary Iranian citizenship both in Iran and abroad. She works within a range of media including site specific installation, animation, digital drawing, photography, signs and products. Through her work, she processes very real experiences of loss, pain, and state-sanctioned violence through animations, wallpapers, flipbooks, and drawings. Forouhar uses culturally specific motifs found within traditional Iranian arts such as Islamic calligraphy and Persian miniature painting to question the ways these forms can generate a lack of individual agency while adhering to a standardized understanding of beauty and cultural identity.

In 2012 she received the Sophie von La Roche Award as recognition for her work that confronts issues concerning displacement, gender and cultural identity.

Solo exhibitions of Forouhar's work have been held at Stavanger Cultural Center, Norway; Golestan Art Gallery, Tehran; Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum fur Gegenwart, Berlin; City Museum, Crailsheim, Germany; and German Cathedral, Berlin.

She has participated in group exhibitions at Framer Framed, Amsterdam, Schim Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Frauenmuseum Bonn; Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt; Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum, Joanneum, Graz, Austria; House of World Cultures, Berlin; Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden; Jewish Museum of Australia, Melbourne; Law Warschaw Gallery at Macalester College, Saint Paul; and Jewish Museum San Francisco.

Opposition to war on Iran Despite the Iranian intelligence service having murdered her parents in the Chain murders of Iran, Forouhar has consistently opposed a foreign military attack on Iran, arguing that such an attack would above all devastate the Iranian people and that democratic change must come from within Iranian society rather than through outside force.

As early as 2012, when asked how her parents would have reacted to the prospect of a Western or American military strike on Iran, she said they would "by no means" have accepted it, adding that for them the territorial integrity and independence of Iran mattered as much as freedom, and that freedom "must well up from within society".

In October 2023 she was among dozens of political and civil activists who signed a statement condemning "the call for a military attack on Iran", which argued that such an attack "would destroy our country and severely weaken and damage the Iranian people's legitimate struggle for democracy and peace".

After the outbreak of the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran in June 2025, Forouhar repeatedly condemned the war while also condemning the Islamic Republic. In an essay published on 18 June 2025 she wrote, "Cursed be this devastating war. Cursed be the mighty invading army of Israel and its accomplices," and equally, "Cursed be that Islamic Republic, which led Iran and its defenceless people into this bloody disaster." She argued that the pursuit of justice could not be conflated with "bombs and rockets", writing that "one cannot be a patriot and defend a military invasion of the homeland". In an interview with the Protestant news agency epd she warned that "murderous attacks from outside are not an opportunity but a danger", said that Iranians "feel like hostages of the regime", and that the strikes had led to still more arrests and executions.