Shirin Neshat: Photographs / Video / Stills

During the past five years, Iranian-born Shirin Neshat has utilized photographic imagery to investigate the lives of women in Islamic cultures. Her black and white portraits of herself, her friends and her family explore the spirituality, sexuality, and politics of Islam.

Writings in Farsi cover the images. The calligraphy is most often over the parts of a woman’s body visible when she wears a veil — the feet, the hands, the eyes. The text comes from sources such as the poetry of contemporary Iranian women, Islamic devotional music or Neshat’s Iranian identity card. Traditional decorative patterns, appropriated from textiles and architectural detail, reference the Persian culture, now largely over-shadowed by religious fundamentalism.   In her newest work, her prototypical Islamic woman can no longer be silent, “but finds her voice.”

This exhibition furthers Neshat’s investigation with new large-scale photographic works with calligraphy, as well as two video projects.

The first is a video projection that explores the relationship of religious devotion to violence. The second, an installation of color stills from a video made in Istanbul, deals with the Muslim woman’s body and its social, political and historical relationship to four fundamentally different environments: public space, private space, a holy space, and a pre-Islamic space.

CONCURRENT:

Fifth International Istanbul Biennial

South Africa Biennial, Johannesburg