Shirin Neshat is an Iranian visual artist best known for her work in photography, video, and film (such as her 1999 film Rapture),which explore the relationship between women and the religious and cultural value systems of Islam. Born into the small and conservative town of Quazvin in 1957 she had little connection to the art world until attending University of California at Berkeley for her final year of high school. There she discovered Western artists and was drawn to women like Frida Kahlo, Eva Hesse and Judy Chicago. She applied for, and was accepted onto, the Graduate Art Course at Berkeley but while there the Iranian Revolution robbed her of her immigration status and could not return to Iran. She moved to New York and started work in Storefront for Art and Architecture with her then husband. The ten years she spent there she attributes her art education to.
She eventually received US citizenship and felt confident enough to return to Iran and visit her family, an experience which was significant in how she saw the world, herself and the role of women in Islam. Much of her work started at this point as she explored the culture and relationships she experienced. She often uses writing as a part of the photograph to explore her themes.
She has said that she hopes the viewers of her work “take away with them not some heavy political statement, but something that really touches them on the most emotional level.” While her early photographs were overtly political, her film narratives tend to be more abstract, focusing around themes of gender, identity, and society. Her Women of Allah series, created in the mid-1990s, introduced themes of the discrepancies of public and private identities in both Iranian and Western cultures. The split-screened video Turbulent (1998) won Neshat the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999. The artist currently lives and works in New York. Her works are included in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.
For me her work is rewarding because it relies heavily on metaphor. The diffierences shown in the public and private attitudes to men and wormen, to exposure and concealment and the delicate line and balance that many people have to follow in their lives to survive, something we can easily forget in Western culture, whether politically or personally.
You can find out more about Shirin's work here :-
Here her TED Talk here:-
or watch her 17 minute film Roja here :-
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