Iranian Artist Uses Plastic Bags to Give Environmental Warning

In her exhibition, Noushin Sharifat used plastic bags to create special shapes showing some dead animals that are either buried in the bags or carrying them in their bodies.

Titled “Indifference”, the exhibition was recently held in Tehran’s Sayeh Gallery with the aim of sending this clear message to the visitors that with the current excessive use of plastic bags, nothing but death is awaiting the animals around us.

Black and white plastic bags mainly used in our daily lives are the sole material used in the exhibition. Sharifat’s artistic pieces have been arranged in a special way to raise awareness about the death of animals around us by our excessive use of plastic bags.

The arrangement of the skeletons of the animals in the bags creates some strange shapes turning the exhibition into a shocking one for some visitors.

Use of real skeleton instead of artificial and hand-made shapes encourages the visitors to look for a logical connection among various parts and concepts of each piece.

A general view of the exhibition warns the visitors that they are facing an environmental issue. The damages inflicted on the environment and human’s negative impacts on the nature and the wild life were the main focus of the exhibition.

The plastic bags used excessively by human beings are highly visible in the creation of each piece. The bags left in the nature or thrown into the seas by the people pave the way for the deaths of many animals.

Sharifat has also used some animal sculls on a piece of barbed wire pointing to the human’s dominance over the nature, limitation of animals’ freedom and restriction of their life-space.

The exhibition was wrapped up on September 26.

What follows are photos of the exhibition, retrieved from