chador

IT IS called IRAN: SISTERS IN CHANEL AND CHADOR and the final major exhibition in the Tees Valley Museums Festival Of Photography comes as a huge surprise that nobody should miss.

In her book, Latife Hanim, Calislar reportedly claims that Ataturk wore a woman's chador to escape his house in April 1923 with a party of women and children.

He praised a woman reporter for wearing 'Ahmadi-Nejad hijab', by which he appeared to mean full Islamic covering including the black head-to-toe chador, and he smiled broadly when a third reporter recited a poem.

* The other man pulled her long veiling chador from behind.

Then I just bit down hard on the edge of my chador. I was an idiot.

In Iran, during the 1970s, women protested against the Shah's insistence they must not wear hijab by donning the chador. They threw their support behind the revolution believing that, in an Islamic state, they would have the freedom to dress as their religious sensibilities dictated.

Many in Iran and other Islamic nations are proud that Iranian women have been required, since the overthrow of the pro-American Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to cover their hair and bodies with the chador. While many, if not most, of them would wear the chador even if it were not required by law, hundreds of thousands would not wear it.

Until the appearance of Turbulent, 1998, a delicate form of allegory expressing complex political sentiment, and especially Rapture, 1999, the work of the New York-based, Iranian-born artist - self-portraits in which she is posed behind a chador, holding a gun - has been the inconspicuous (and rather transparent) agent of another weary rivulet of multiculturalism.

Her poems were nicely woven into the plot, especially when a segment about the black chador was staged, which was swiftly followed by a video of the poem 'Aseer Shehzadi'.

Another customer, Chador said before the ban only those who had a decent income could afford the chilies from Yangtse.

The debate may have been given its greatest push by the photograph of a woman in Mashhad wearing a head-to-toe traditional chador while standing on a pillar and waving a headscarf from the end of a stick.