Shirin Neshat | The Unspoken Female Power
Shirin Neshat is best known for her work in photography, video, and film exploring the relationship between women and the religious and cultural value systems of Islam.
Neshat left Iran to study art in Los Angeles in 1974, just prior to the Iran Islamic Revolution; and she did not return until 1990. Neshat began making art about the collision of western and eastern ideologies. In 1983, Islamic law dictated the wearing of chador for women.
The chador, or veil, is a strong protagonist of the shots that she often takes of herself too, which she uses as a media and channel to examine the physical, emotional, and cultural implications of veiled women in Iran.
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 dichotomy of public and private identities in both Iranian and Western cultures. The series features images of women with written words taken from religious texts.
In 1999, she won the 48th Venice Biennial prize for her film Turbulent, which contrasts a man singing in front of an all-male audience, with a woman singing to an empty concert hall. Her work has been shown throughout Europe and the United States, however it has never been shown in her home country Iran.
Part of me has always resisted the Western clichéd image of Muslim women, depicting them as nothing more than silent victims. My art, without denying 'repression,' is a testimony to unspoken female power and the continuing protest in Islamic culture.
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.”
Can humans live fulfilling lives
in isolation?
“People say my work is all about control, but it’s not, really,” Andrea Zittel remarks.
“I am always looking for the grey area between freedom—which can sometimes feel too open-ended and vast—and security—which may easily turn into confinement.”
A great example is her “A–Z Pocket Property,” a forty-four-ton floating fantasy island off the coast of Denmark, commissioned by the Danish government, contrasts the extremes of a creative escape with the isolation that occurs when a person is removed from society.
Discover the hidden meaning of "The Netherlandish Proverbs"
We're no strangers to Pieter Bruegel The Elder's detailed compositions of bustling scenes where everything is happening.
In this Netherlandish Proverbs, dated 1559, a variety of, well, dutch proverbs are depicted mixing in the frame. Many of these are not familiar to most of us since fell into disuse well before 1900, but it's still intriguing to try and and catch some.
For example, the top left corner of the painting shows a couple kissing at a window, above which a black broomstick sticks out. This scene enacts the proverb “To marry under the broomstick” which means living together without marrying.
Right below, a man is looking through his hand or fingers. This scene is enacting the proverb “To look through one’s fingers” which means to turn a blind eye.
The painting contains a total of 43 proverbs!
Turns out, even Eva Hesse was suffering from creative block at times
And this is how Sol LeWitt would alleviate her pain.