The Echo of Protest is Distant to the Protest

Book Design

2025

Author: Nazanin Noori
Edited by: Nan Xi, Nazanin Noori, Fabian Schöneich
Graphic design: Elisabetta Porcinai
Translation: Robert Schlicht
Proofreading: Rachel Walther
Printing: Sportflieger, Berlin
Published by: Spector Books
Book photos: Diana Pfammatter

Nazanin Noori’s artist book THE ECHO OF PROTEST IS DISTANT TO THE PROTEST is an expansion of her solo exhibition of the same title at CCA Berlin in 2024, where the artist merged sound, sculpture, and text to create an immersive installation addressing the psychic aftermath of political protest. While emerging from the recent resistant movement against the Islamic Republic of Iran sparked off by Jina Amini’s death in 2022, the sonic-poetic assemblage also goes far beyond this context, delving into the digital dissemination of protest more broadly, the emotional (im)mobilization of the public, and the spectatorship of suffering.

At the heart of the book is a graphic poem composed by Noori in English, which extends the exhibition’s word sculptures. Across the pages, words from the long poem overwrite a Shia ritual chant in Farsi, (“O Kufians, You Who Are Faithless”). Originally written by Shahab Mousavi as a lament for the Battle of Karbala—a tragic event in Shia Islam commemorated annually during Muharram—the chant was first performed during ceremonies in Yazd, Iran in 2012 by an allmale choir, and later repurposed as a political slogan in the Jina Amini protests.

In a graphic polyptych dialogue, the Farsi chant embodies a patriarchal chorus, while the English poem offers a subversive feminist commentary, voiced by the artist herself.