Shirin Neshat Curatorial Statement

Benjamin CeciArt History II – Final

5/9/2016

1“Being political is an integral part of being Iranian. Our lives are defined by politics.” – Shirin Neshat1

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian visual artist whose work is a bold statement about censorship, feminism, politics, and religion. Her contribution to the art world earned her an honorary professorship at the Berlin University of the Arts, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize – one of the most prestigious awards available.2

Growing up in Iran, she experienced the secular culture that the Shah promoted through the government, and in 1974 she moved to the United States in order to study at UC Berkeley. In 1990 she moved back to Iran, after completing her BA, MA, and MFA, and she discovered a radical change in the culture of her home country. Women now wore chadors to cover themselves completely, as opposed to when the Shah was in power and chadors were looked down upon. The Islamic revolution that took place in her absence led her to create her first series of pictures, Women of Allah. (1993-1997) 3

Neshat produced a series of black and white photos of Iranian women wearing chadors, with their visible skin covered in writing. In the majority of the photos, the figures are holding guns, sometimes pointing them directly at the camera. Neshat commented on the series, explaining that the text on the women’s hands and faces is “poetry by contemporary Iranian women poets who had written on the subject of martyrdom and the role of women in the revolution.”4 Each photo is a statement on the subject of female warriors during the Islamic Revolution, and how they affected Iran’s future culture and political beliefs.

1 Homa Khaleeli, “Shirin Neshat, “A long way from home,” The Guardian, June 13, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jun/13/shirin-

neshat-women-without-men2

Heartney, Eleanor (2007). After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. Munich: Prestel. pp. 230–231

3 “Shirin Neshat” Guggenheim.org http://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/shirin-neshat4

Judith K. Brodsky, Ferris Olin, “The Fertile Crescent – Gender, Art, and Society,” cwah.rutger.edu,

https://cwah.rutgers.edu/media/uploads/FertileCrescentExcerpt.pdf

Rebellious silence (1994) Allegiance with Wakefulness (1994) Speechless (1996)

Rebellious Silence is a picture of a woman, with all but her face completely covered by a chador, holding a gun in front of her head. Her face is covered in Iranian poetry and her eyes are staring directly at the viewer, “suggesting a far more complex and paradoxical reality behind the surface.”4 Even without being able to read the writing on her face, we understand the importance of the words. The presence of guns shows that these women have a cause, and they are willing to die for it. They aren’t doing it for personal gain or fame; they are doing it because it’s what they believe in.

All of the works in her Women of Allah series follow the same theme and features the same four symbols: a gun, a chador, the text, and the stare. Neshat uses the gun to compare it’s meaning of cruelty and violence with the innocence and beauty of feminine traits, which creates a contradiction within her art and comments on the complex structure of Islam itself.5

Even though she was trained as a painter, she chose to use photography as her medium of choice because she was inspired by photojournalism, and felt that photography “worked best with her topic: conveying realism, immediacy, and a sense of drama.6” She also said that she used the simplicity of the photos to her advantage. It gives a sense of clarity within its very complex setting, and it allows her to explore and highlight the juxtapositions of the ideas she’s visualizing.6

In 1998 she revealed her next piece of art, a two screen visual installation called Turbulent. She says that the project was inspired by a young blind girl she encountered when visiting Istanbul. The girl was singing to an audience of no one, without a formal stage or audience, much like the isolation of female singers in Iran. According to the Shi’ite Muslim laws, women are not allowed to sing in public, unlike before the revolution, where women singers were part of a tradition that went back to the Ottoman empire.6

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25 Leon Tai, “Research: Shirin Neshat,” Open Source Studio https://oss.adm.ntu.edu.sg/leon0179/tag/shirin-neshat/

6 Shadi Sheybani, “Women of Allah: A Conversation with Shirin Neshat,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 1999,

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0038.207

Turbulent (shows two different videos running in sync with each other, one of a male singer with a large stage audience (comprised of men), and another of a woman with no audience whatsoever. He stands facing the camera, as if he was representing the group, while she stands facing her would be audience. The man starts to sing a song, which (according to Neshat) is a Persian song about divine love, that talks about “traditional codes and reiterates conventions of the past.6” When he finishes his song, the woman begins to sing. However, her song contains no lyrics, she instead vocalizes sounds, making her singing universal and unidentifiable. 7

The woman appears to be much more involved in her singing, moving her body, hands, and head to the music, while the camera spins around her and gives a sense of drama. Her vocalizations become more harsh as the song goes on, becoming a bit more disturbing and primal, echoing in the empty room. While the man is singing to entertain an audience, she is singing for herself, to show her own feelings, and this seems to shock the man on the other screen. Turbulent (1998)

Rapture, a continuation of the ideas brought forth in Turbulent, is another black and white two screen video projection that Neshat created in 1999. It shows the difference between an all male community, and an all female community in two separate locations. Comprised of hundreds of actors dressed in matching clothes, depending on which community they are in. It shows the men practicing elaborate rituals in a fortress, and doing tasks that conform to the behavior of all the other men. Meanwhile, the chador clad women walk across a beach, carrying a large boat to set out to sea with a few of their people. Neshat imagines the ending to be “a testament to the women’s sense of adventurousness, in opposition to the men, who stay within their inner boundaries, the women become very brave.”8

Rapture (1999)

These two projects led her to create a third, and final, video in a trilogy that he had not planned beforehand. Her last piece, which she considers to have closed the

7 “Full text of “Shirin Neshat: Turbulent.”,” Archive.org https://archive.org/stream/shirinneshatturb1626nesh/shirinneshatturb1626nesh_djvu.txt

8 “Rapture 1999” Whitney Museum of American Art, http://collection.whitney.org/object/12270

chapter on the series, is called Fervor (1999). The final installation places two videos side by side, creating a sort of single symmetrical, mirrored video. It shows a man on one screen, and a woman on the other. They walk past each other several times, but never interact throughout the entire video. There is a constant black wall between the two videos, symbolizing a separation of gender and society that each actor is stuck in. At one point, they are attending a speech, and the two genders are separated by a black curtain – similar to how the videos are separated by a black bar.

Fervor (1999)

Soliloquy (1999) is one of her most personal works, featuring her as the subject in another two screen video projection. On one screen, we see a traditional eastern city (filmed in Mardin, Turkey), and on the other we see a modern cityscape (filmed in Albany, New York)9. In both videos, we see Neshat roaming around the vastly different cities, their architecture highlighting the difference between locations andtraditions.

Soliloquy (1999)

The New York cityscape is much more advanced, while the video in turkey is much more traditional, but equally as stunning. She wears her chador throughout both videos, symbolizing her understanding and appreciation of both worlds that she experienced throughout her life.

Passage is another visually compelling film, created by Neshat in 2001. This film, unlike her previous work, is displayed in color on a single screen. It shows a group of men carrying a body across a beach, with a group of veiled women dig a grave with their hands.

Passage (2001)The video is a demonstration of a Muslim funeral, with bright orange colors coming from the flames to contrast the dark black chadors that the women are wearing.

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Bibliography39

“Shirin Neshat, Soliloquy (1999),” Arts Connected, March 1, 2009, http://www.artsconnected.org/resource/87303/shirin-neshat-soliloquy-

1999

Homa Khaleeli, “Shirin Neshat, “A long way from home,” The Guardian, June 13, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jun/13/shirin-neshat-women-without-men

Heartney, Eleanor (2007). After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. Munich: Prestel. pp. 230–231.

“Shirin Neshat” Guggenheim.org http://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/shirin-neshatJudith K. Brodsky, Ferris Olin, “The Fertile Crescent – Gender, Art, and Society,” cwah.rutger.edu, https://cwah.rutgers.edu/media/uploads/FertileCrescentExcerpt.pdf

Leon Tai, “Research: Shirin Neshat,” Open Source Studio https://oss.adm.ntu.edu.sg/leon0179/tag/shirin-neshat/

Shadi Sheybani, “Women of Allah: A Conversation with Shirin Neshat,” MichiganQuarterly Review, 1999, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0038.207;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg

“Full text of “Shirin Neshat: Turbulent.”,” Archive.org https://archive.org/stream/shirinneshatturb1626nesh/shirinneshatturb1626nesh_djvu.txt

“Rapture 1999,” Whitney Museum of American Art, http://collection.whitney.org/object/12270“Shirin Neshat, Soliloquy (1999),” Arts Connected, March 1, 2009, http://www.artsconnected.org/resource/87303/shirin-neshat-soliloquy-1999