Homa Arkani was born in Tehran in 1983, and in 2005 obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design from Tehran’s Azad University. With her unique brand of pop art, Homa ingeniously portrays the socio-cultural issues faced by a generation of disillusioned youth. Born after the Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war (1980 – 1988), the girls who are so outlandishly featured in her Share Me series represent a people caught between traditional values and mores, and their own distorted visions of the West.

Via the internet and satellite television, these youngsters voraciously consume Western celebrity culture, although in striving to be like the glitzy superstars whose faces grace their television screens, they have instead become their exaggerated, superlative, and hugely artificial inferiors. Additionally, being technologically savvy and attuned to all things Western, they are heavy consumers of social media, which provides an effective outlet for expressions and emotions that in a conservative country such as Iran, remain largely supressed otherwise.

Being neither completely traditional nor Western, these disillusioned, West-crazed, over-the-top youth caught in the midst of a generational identity crisis are effectively brought to life in Homa’s paintings.