Faces Of Change

By MALU HALASA Thursday, May 06, 2004

HOME FRONT: Shadi Ghadirian's Domestic Life (2002) challenges the stereotypical role of women as housewives in Iran�s social order

Thursday, May. 6, 2004

When Shirin Neshat's photographs and films of Iranian women in chadors propelled her to international prominence in the 1990s, she didn't mind that her work was little known in her own country. After her privately screened films provoked extreme reactions — from enthusiasm to outright denunciation — she preferred to keep a low profile. But her country is catching up with her. Last year Neshat's work was publicly exhibited in Tehran for the first time, and her conceptual 12-minute film Tooba (2003), a poetic fable about a Persian woman who thinks she is a tree, was well received. Iranians, she says, are becoming more attuned to allegorical art. "In Iran, poetic language is subversive," says the petite, soft-spoken Neshat. "It is the only way that something can be said that can be read between the lines."

There's plenty of reading material in "Far Near Distance," the largest exhibition in Europe of Iranian fine art, photography, installation, sculpture, film, music and literature. The exhibition, which runs through May 9 at Berlin's House of World Cultures, features 19 artists, both exiles and those who live in Iran. For the first time, Iran's old guard — Neshat, photojournalists Abbas and the late Kaveh Golestan, filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami — appear alongside the next generation of pop artists, photographers and filmmakers. What unites them is a fixation on Iranian identity and place.

The Berlin exhibition examines the social fissures that contribute to Iran's political unease, helping to explain why half the country voted with its feet last month, boycotting the parliamentary elections. Coming 25 years after the Islamic revolution, the boycott was the protest of a growing civil and consumer society against theocratic rule and its periodic cycles of censorship and violence. This subversive mood is reflected in the works on display — some from before the revolution.

Neshat, 47, first gained international recognition with her Women of Allah (1993-97) series, veiled self-portraits inscribed with 1960s Iranian feminist poetry that challenged Western stereotypes of Muslim women. Her piece in the exhibition, Turbulent (1998), is a split-screen video installation featuring the avant-garde singer Sussan Deyhim, who wrote the music for Tooba, performing to a dark, empty auditorium. On another screen, a male vocalist sings verses from the poet Rumi to an appreciative audience of men. The piece meditates on women's voicelessness in Islam and Iran's laws that prevent them from singing in public. "In many ways the foundation of Turbulent, and much of the work I've made since, is very Iranian," says Neshat, who has lived in New York City since 1984. "But ultimately I have a message that is larger than the boundaries of Iran, one that is also timeless in the sense of feeling oppression and incarceration — and the breaking of that."