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shirin neshat
About the Artist
Shirin Neshat (b. 1957, Qazvin, Iran) is a celebrated artist who lives and works in New York. Her chosen mediums are photography, video and film.
In 1974, she left Iran to study art in California, where she obtained a BA from UC Berkeley. Her return to Iran in 1990 was the catalyst for her artistic production, even though her work is banned in the country and the artist has been living in exile in the United States since 1993.
She has been the recipient of such prestigious awards as the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and the Lillian Gish Prize in New York in 2006. The artist’s works can be found in major museums around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Guggenheim New York; Tate Modern, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Singapore Art Museum. The Broad in Los Angeles gave her a major retrospective in 2020 titled Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again.
Neshat’s art explores identity, humanity and social roles, particularly informed by beauty and its centrality to spiritual Islam. Using her artistic practice to draw attention to political issues in Iran and internationally, Neshat challenges the idea of art for art’s sake and probes into tensions between gender identity and cultural or political structures.
Shirin Neshat. Photo: Rodolfo Martinez.
Courtesy the Artist and Goodman Gallery.
WORKS IN THE COLLECTION
Shirin Neshat, "I am its Secret", 1993
Fujicolor Crystal Archive Print, 47.9 × 31.7 cm
Edition 1 of 250
Courtesy the artist
I am its Secret (1993) and Guardians of Revolution (1994) are part of Neshat’s Women of Allah series: the first series to bring the artist international recognition. It was created between 1993 and 1997 after a trip to Iran where she had photographed veiled women armed with heavy weaponry who had become ‘voluntarily militant’ following the Islamic Revolution. ‘Women of Allah’, Neshat explained, ‘asked how such women stood at that intersection of love, faith, devotion – yet cruelty, violence and ultimately death.’
Her photographs capture both fear and courage and reveal a dichotomy between aggression and vulnerability.
I am its Secret (1993) is a self-portrait from the Women of Allah series. It shows the artist veiled with a black headscarf covering her hair, forehead, nose and mouth. The viewer is confronted by her direct gaze. Neshat represents herself as an archetype of the Middle Eastern woman and questions their contested relationship with the veil: a symbol of both repression for those women who are against mandatory hijab and submission for those who are deeply religious.Shielding her identity yet opening up a passage to her psyche through her eyes, the strength of this image is unparalleled. Her face is covered in calligraphic script, accessible to Persian readers only.
Shirin Neshat, "Guardians of Revolution (from the Women of Allah series)", 1994
Edition 5 of 10
Signed, dated, numbered and titled on verso
Courtesy the artist
In Guardians of Revolution (1994), the hands are held in a gesture suggestive of prayer and are covered with a poem written in Persian text, acting as an analogue to the spoken word. The strong relationship between text and image creates what has become known as Neshat’s ‘visual poetry’ and serves, in the artist’s own words, to ‘give voice to the body and body to the voice’.
Shirin Neshat, "Veiled Woman in Three Arches (from the Soliloquy series)", 1999
Industrial marble with brass, 29.5 x 29.5 cm
Courtesy the artist and Tabari Artspace
Veiled Women in Three Arches (1999) explores the politicised nature of the female body in dialogue with architecture. Part of the artist’s Soliloquy series and originally rendered in film, she used architecture to explore images of the cultures – both Eastern and Western – of the grouped women. The video was shot in Turkey and the United States: a reflection of the artist’s own relationship with living between two different countries.