A Rehearsal for a Revolution
2025
A Rehearsal for a Revolution examines everyday strategies of resistance, focusing on the human body as a tool for resisting systems of oppression and structures of power. The project combines sound, video, animation, and sculptural works realised through diverse materials and techniques. These elements emerge from Razavi’s encounters with survivors of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement currently unfolding in Iran.
When the human body is under constant surveillance and regulation, it becomes a site of oppression. Inevitably, small choices around one’s clothing, public appearance, or bodily gestures become revolutionary acts of rebellion, and the body assumes a central role in resistance and political action.
Under conditions of constant surveillance and regulation, the human body becomes a site of oppression. Within such contexts, seemingly minor personal choices around one’s clothing, public appearance, or bodily gestures become revolutionary acts of rebellion, and the body assumes a central role in resistance and political action.
The exhibition unfolds across four sequential spaces — Rehearsal Room, Living Room, The Mortuary, and Machine Room — conceived to be experienced chronologically as a spatial and narrative progression.
A Rehearsal for a Revolution forms part of Bita Razavi’s recent body of work addressing everyday strategies of resistance. In this series, the artist confronts the political realities of Iran for the first time since her arrest in Tehran in 2012, an event that led to the creation of Bosphorus: A Trilogy (2012). A subsequent chapter of this ongoing inquiry, Lemmings, a dance-based performance, premiered in November 2025 as part of the Baltic Circle Festival in Helsinki.