SEPTEMBER – SHIRIN NESHAT
Shirin
Neshat grew up in Iran before the Islamic Revolution. By the time
Ayatollah Khomeini replaced the Shah, she was living in the United
States, where her parents had sent her to study. She graduated from the
University of California in Berkeley in 1983 and moved to New York. When
she went back to Iran to visit her family in the 1990s, the changes in
her country affected her deeply. She began making photographs, videos,
and films about women living in an Islamic theocracy. Neshat considers
herself a secular Muslim.
Between
1993 and 1997 she made a series of stark, conceptualized,
black-and-white portraits that she called Women of Allah. In the series,
which includes self-portraits, the subjects wear chadors and their
faces, hands, and feet are covered with calligraphic text in
Farsi—excerpts from poems written by Iranian women on the subject of
martyrdom and the role of women in the revolution. A gun is a key
element in the images. Neshat's later work is less apparently political
and more philosophical. In Rapture (1999), a thirteen-minute,
16mm-film-and-sound installation, a screen showing men in white shirts
in a stone fortress is juxtaposed with a screen on which a group of
veiled women move in a mysterious, lyrically abstract way across a bare
landscape and then into the sea.
Neshat's first feature film, Women
Without Men (2009), which is set in 1953, when Iran's democratically
elected government was overthrown in a coup backed by the CIA, won the
Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival. In 2015, the
Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., mounted a retrospective of her
work, Facing History.
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