
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.”
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