Speechless 1996, B/W RC print and ink, photo: Larry Barns Courtesy Barbara Gladstone
Shirin Neshat doesn't quite know where to call home. The 43-year-old artist was
born and raised in Iran but moved to the U.S. after high school to study art.
When the Islamic Revolution overtook her homeland in 1979, Neshat was exiled and
couldn't return until 11 years later--and the country she went home to bore
little resemblance to the one she left.
Neshat dealt with her sense of displacement by trying to untangle the ideology of Islam through art. The result
was Women of Allah (1993-97), a photographic series of militant Muslim women
that subverts the stereotype and examines the Islamic idea of martyrdom. In 1996,
Neshat began working with film, eager to create more poetic, open-ended works.
She produced a trilogy of split-screen video installations--Turbulent (1998),
Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000)--all sumptuously filmed meditations on the
male/female dynamic in Islamic societies. Her current exhibition--at London's
Serpentine Gallery until Sept. 3 then at Hamburger Kunsthalle in January--
presents Women of Allah and all three video installations together for the first
time. Here is a selection of images from the exhibition.
