Shirin Neshat, an Iranian-American artist based in New York, is one of the
most significant contemporary artists working today. Having achieved
international renown as a photographer in the 1990s with her stark and
visually arresting photographic series Women of Allah, Neshat has since
shifted her focus towards the more fluid and complex media of video and
film.
Shirin Neshat: Women without Men and Other Works at the Hamburger
Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin surveys the recent developments in
the practice of this leading international artist, introducing two films –
Mahdokht (2004) and Zarin (2005) – from the yet to be completed five-part
feature film Women without Men. Both multi-screen installations are to be
shown for the first time in Berlin, the second of which will receive its
world premiere on this occasion.
Born in 1957 in Qazvin, Iran, Shirin Neshat moved as a teenager to the
United States to study art, five years before the revolution overtook her
country in 1979. She completed a Masters degree in Fine Arts (Painting) at
the University of California in Berkeley in 1982 and later moved to New
York. Her first return to her home country in 1990, her encounter with a
land so culturally, politically and socially altered in the period of her
absence, inspired the photos of Women of Allah, a series bringing her
immediate international renown. Her video installations have appeared at
Documenta 11 alongside many of the major international biennales from Sydney
to Kwangju to São Paulo, and she was honored with the Golden Lion award at
the 48th Biennale of Venice in 1999. In 2004 she was awarded an honorary
professorship at the Universität der Künste, Berlin.
The Berlin presentation centers on Shirin Neshat’s most recent body of work
entitled Women without Men. Based on the novel of the same name by Iranian
author Shahrnush Parsipur, which was banned soon after being published in
Tehran in 1989, and its author imprisoned, this new series of films signals
her entry into the realm of feature filmmaking and consolidates the
mythological turn taken by her work in Tooba (2002). After Parsipur’s
provocative allegory of life in contemporary Iran, Neshat’s newest poetic
vision traces the lives of five women who find themselves in a garden of
ephemeral paradise having followed fraught and laborious paths to arrive
there.
Echoing the trope of the five women’s restless journeys, the exhibition
surveys the key moments and vicissitudes in Neshat’s already rich artistic
and personal trajectory. A selection of large-format black-and-white photos
drawn from her seminal Women of Allah and Unveiling series marks the point
of departure. Strikingly minimalist, Neshat’s early photos deploy charged
symbols – weapons and writing, the body and the veil – while invoking
contrasts and dichotomies of color, form, gender and space to probe and
problematize post-revolutionary Iran and the situation of women within that
society.
Retrospectively conceived as a trilogy, Neshat’s second major body of work
encompassing Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000) transplanted
her interrogation of the interface between gender and culture, the
exploration of cultural displacement and exile, to the medium of video
installation. In Berlin, this landmark injection of movement, sound and
spatiality into her ambiguous and ambivalent enquiry will be represented by
Rapture. Continuing the powerfully reduced black-and-white aesthetic of her
photography, this split-screen installation physically enacts the polarity
and energy between the men and women on screen, plunging the viewer – in
contrast to cinema – into the discursive, confrontational space between the
two screens, a space of central importance to Shirin Neshat’s work on the
whole.
Throughout her artistic career Shirin Neshat’s oeuvre has provoked visceral
reactions from her audiences, yielding as many affirmations as invectives.
Across the board she has been praised for her authenticity and
subversiveness and criticized at the same time for reproducing stereotypes
and invoking a new orientalism. By focusing on the most recent film work of
the artist, whose subversive filmic language and universalist vision, or
“navigation between two cultures”, as the artist puts it, with their
orientation towards both Iranian and western modes of cinematography
destabilizes the fixation of critical reception on ethnicity and
authenticity, this exhibition takes up the open-endedness of the works
themselves; it brings to the fore the complex identity of the artistic
practice of “an Iranian artist with an Iranian background working in New
York within the ‘western’ institution of ‘fine art’” (V. Vitali).
The exhibition is curated by Dr. Britta Schmitz, curator at the Hamburger
Bahnhof – Berlin, and guest curator, Beatrice E. Stammer and has been
generously funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds. A fully illustrated 112-page
catalogue will be published by Steidl Verlag, Göttingen to accompany the
exhibition.
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