Shirin Neshat

Woman Of The Week

Feb 26

Today, our Woman of the Week is Shirin Neshat!

Born in Qazvin, Iran, Shirin is a visual artist known for her extensive photography, film and video work exploring notions of gender, identity and society.

Raised in Iran, Shirin left in 1975 to study Art at UC Berkeley, completing her BA, MA and MFA. After graduating in 1983, she moved to New York, where she began working at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, an alternative space in Manhattan. While working there, Shirin took a hiatus from art, destroying the few pieces she made as she did not find them “substantial”.

In 1990, she returned to Iran for the first time since leaving for college. Shocked by how much the country had changed since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Shirin began making a photographic series in 1993 “Women of Allah” and the piece “Unveiling” that explored Islamic fundamentalism and militancy in her home country. “Women of Allah” her first serious installation, features women covered in Persian calligraphy. Shirin highlights themes of public and private identities in both Iranian and Western cultures, and the cultural and religious values that precede them. She emphasizes this by applying stark visual contrasts between light and dark, black and white, woman and female, also used later in her first video installations the split-screened trilogy of Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999), and Fervor (2000). Her work in Turbulent and Rapture won Shirin the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999.

Since then, Shirin has gone on to create many photographic and video series, winning the Silver Lion Award for best director at the 66th Venice Film Festival for her directorial debut Women Without Men, a film exploring the lives of four women in Tehran during the American-backed coup.

Despite her work covering deep political issues, Shirin hopes that viewers of her work “take away with them not some heavy political statement, but something that really touches them on the most emotional level.”