Sevdaliza dedicated a poem to Iran, the country where she was born and where she never returned. Her family moved to the Netherlands when she was 5 years old, in 1992. “My very existence is an act of resistance,” she told Vanity Fair Italy. «Maybe because I was born in Iran, I always felt that I had to express my femininity, which is not allowed in my country: I couldn't do anything I do if I still lived in Tehran. So my actions have a different meaning.”
Conceptual and multidisciplinary pop artist, he debuted with Ison of 2017 and got noticed in 2020 with Shabrang (we wrote about it here). She was on stage with Madonna, she collaborated with Grimes and Anitta among others, she invented a robotic alter ego called Dahlia, she combines music, fashion, activism.
His latest album is Heroine of 2025. The song from four years ago Woman Life Freedom is dedicated to Iranian women. «Knowing that those girls don't know if they will return home in the evening makes me feel on the one hand proud and on the other also very sad, because it is difficult to maintain hope when things never change. But you always have to try”, he said to Vanity Fair.
He summarized his ideas and feelings in a poem that he published on Instagram while protests and violent repression continue in his home country.
My name is Sevdaliza.
I'm Iranian.
I was forced to leave a place
that has never stopped living inside me.
They stole Iran from me.
They severed it from my future,
from the steps of my children,
from simple law
to return without fear.
Exile is not distance.
It is a sentence that is carried in the body.
I can't bring my children back
to show them where my voice was formed,
where my femininity learned the sense of challenge,
where beauty survived under pressure.
We won't walk the streets
who raised me.
We won't point to something and say: it's ours.
They took my homeland away from me
and they called it politics.
They took the borders and wrapped them in ideology.
They took the return and called it treason.
They took my right to membership
and they replaced it with fear and confusion.
But identity is not a thing
that a regime can revoke.
Iran lives in my cadence,
in the weight of my vowels,
in the pride with which I live,
in the guilt I feel for being safe,
and in the resistance that I have refined by making art of it.
I carry Iran in my spine,
in refusing to disappear,
the way I mother,
the way my thick black hair waves,
in the way I create,
in the way I remain ungovernable.
Maybe my children will never see that land,
but they will inherit the truth:
that Iran is more than a government,
more than its borders,
more than those who control the gates.
Iran is a people.
Iran is a way of being.
Iran is survival.
