Shirin Neshat’s Dreamlands
Shirin Neshat is an image maker of ample gifts. Born in Qazvin, Iran, she moved to California in 1974 to study art. In 1990, eleven years after the (fateful) Iranian Revolution, she returned to Iran and soon began work on her debut photographic series, Women of Allah (1994). Like poetry to decipher, these stark black-and-white portraits of women, many of whom have text inscribed on their bodies, offer up complex emotional registers. Some of her subjects carry firearms, evoking a battle recently waged, or a battle to come. Since then, Neshat’s work has taken a zigzag journey from photography to video installation and, finally, to cinema.
Few artists have made such a seamless transition to creating feature films, and yet Neshat makes her restless movement between forms appear natural—necessary, even. From one work to the next, the aura of Neshat’s distinctive signature remains. Some critics have burdened her work with the specter of speaking for or about the fates of women, or women from the Middle East in particular. But a true accounting of Neshat’s art, and the rich range of her references, reveals that ambiguity is the land in which her work resides. As a self-described nomad, Neshat says, “we have this ability to approach different places and people and subjects and make them our own.”
Negar Azimi: Shirin, as an artist you’ve brought images into the world that are burned into the mind. They’re literally stuck—certainly in my own. They’re images of such iconicity, of such jaw-dropping beauty and enigma. I’m thinking, for example, of the stark juxtaposition of the male and the female singer in (1998). Or (1999), in which you see women marching defiantly into a murky sea. Your gift for composition is significant, and you’ve created a visual vocabulary that I think is all your own.
