The artists, Shadi Ghadirian (b.1974) and Sepideh Salehi (1972) adopt a hybrid form of narrative to confront the restrictions imposed on women of their generation. Focusing on motives such as the objectification of women, the censorship imposed on women’s public as well as private image and the lack of ownership over one’s own identity and body, they depict the decline of women’s rights. Inspired by the events of their lives, questioning the social patriarchy, they shed light on the concurrent struggles, growing dogma and the constraints that deprived women of their freedom. As a Persian female researcher and artist growing up in Iran, two generations after the artists, based on my PhD research and interviews with the artists, I trace the impact of art in retrieving one’s voice versus the Otherness imposed on women. Basing myself on the ideas of the Russian philosopher Michael Bakhtin (1895-1975), namely his concept of polyphony or the plurality of contradictory voices, and the views of Judith Butler on othering and giving an account to oneself, I analyse how through their works the artists confront and exceed restrictions, depict and reunify the fragmented female identity and image. I analyse, by choosing a hyperbolic approach towards nostalgia and bans, Ghadirian confronts the futility of dogma on modern women. Similarly, Salehi takes the effect of these regressions and focuses on the internalisation of dogma as a social convention. Salehi highlights how women have been deprived of ownership over their own bodies. Further, I examine the artists’ self-portraits and their references to the decline of the feminine image in private as well as public settings. As a contextual narrative, each of the selected works embodies a new wave of feminist ideologies which resonates with the concurrent Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran. As a symbolic means of self-expression and an act of rebellion, the artworks epitomise the urgency for reconstructing an authentic and liberal form of identity for women under suppression.