“I am not satisfied with just explaining my culture. I don’t want to be an ethnographic artist.”
It has been Neshat’s fate to live a life inextricably bound up with politics and geopolitical upheaval. Shirin Neshat was born in Qazvin, Iran in 1957, just four years after the CIA-assisted coup that replaced Iran’s first democratically elected government with Shah Reza Pahlavi, a leader more sympathetic to Western interests. While the Shah’s regime was beneficial to the class of the educated, Western-learning Iranians to which her family belonged, the manner of its instatement left a festering resentment especially among those who were not sharing the fruits of the country’s alignment with the West.In 1975 she left to go to art school at the University of California Berkeley and found herself stranded in the US when the Iranian revolution replaced the Shah with an Islamic fundamentalist government. For the next 13 years Nehshat was unable to return home and from distant america she received news of further upheavals and conflicts involving her native country. She returned to Iran for the first time in 1990, establishing a vast difference between her memories and current reality which manifested itself visually in the form of a change of medium through which to express herself.
Upon her return to New York, Neshat emerged in the art scene at a time when the creative world was caught up in a fascination with the “other”. A young Iranian woman whose early work deliberately employed symbols associated with her culture, was swept up into this embrace of otherness. Having studied painting at Berkley, Neshat decided to turn to photojournalism. Her first widely acclaimed body of work ‘Women of Allah’: a series of black and white photographs that depict the artist, clad in a chandor (full body semi-circle of fabric that is closed down the front). She covered the parts of the photograph that expose parts of her body (which by Islamic law were confined to feet, hands and face) with inscriptions of Farsi poetry written by Iranian women poets such as Forough Farokhzad and Tahereh Saffarzadeh. The poems range in content from explorations of female desires and fears to militant calls for women’s participation in the Iranian revolution. These works were Neshat’s reactions to the changed status of women in Iran’s Islamic society. They make note on the one hand of the mandated female uniform and on the other of the role played by women in the revolution and the war against Iraq. Neshat was particularly interested in women’s part in the perpetuation of the ideal of politically motivated martyrdom in a religious state. In retrospect, Neshat criticises these works for what she sees as their neutral and even romanticised view of women’s place in a revolutionary society. Western commentators on the other hand, were more inclined to read them a critique of Iranian society’s violence and repression of women. In such readings, Neshat became a champion of Western ideals of individuality, secularism and sexual equality.
Neshat’s first Mlianese exhibition presented by the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea is ‘Body of Evidence’ including the ‘Women of Allah’ series and progressing through her journey in video, film and theatrical media. Her work goes beyond the static thematics of gender and uses dualism as a starting point to explore the tension between “belonging and exile, sanity and insanity, dream and reality’.
Persia has a long and highly respected tradition of the visual arts particularly manifested in miniature paintings together with calligraphy known as ‘art of the book.’
