Shirin Neshat

SILVER SERIES #7
14.03.24 – 24.03.24

SILVER SERIES is a screening series presenting international artists that work with film and video in our cinema. This edition presents a selection of films by the artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.

Screening times

Click here

Program

Turbulent (1998, 10 min)

Turbulent marks Neshat’s departure from still photography towards video installation and her first attempt to focus on the issue of gender in relation to the social structure of Islamic Iran. The main subject of the work is an inquiry into the absence of Iranian women from musical practice (women have often been banned from taking part in such activity, while men are free to enjoy public performances and recordings).

Turbulent was designed as a two-channel projection for two facing screens, where the viewer is meant to be standing between them, witnessing a musical duel between a male and a female singer. The man performs, before an appreciative audience, a traditional, passionate love song with lyrics by the great Iranian mystic Rumi (the vocal, sung by Shahram Nazeri, was lip-synched by Shoja Azari); while the woman (played by Sussan Deyhim) performs a more unusual vocalization to an empty auditorium, building to an emotional intensity that then transfixes the male singer and his audience.

Visually and conceptually, Turbulent was conceived by Neshat, around the idea of opposites: black and white forms, male and female singers, empty vs. full theaters, stationary and rotating cameras, traditional and non-traditional music. Ultimately, the female singer subverts every rule of traditional museum and pioneers a style of her own, while the male singer remains within the perimeter of convention.

Rapture (1999, 13 min)

Created as a part of trilogy, along with Turbulent (1998,) and Fervor (2000,) with similar visual and conceptual approach Rapture explores the topic of gender in Islamic cultures, but here it relates specifically to ideas around nature and culture. Highly stylized, the work removes its female subjects from their customary urban setting and places them in natural environments. Also designed as two projections installed facing one another, Rapture requires the viewer to shift his or her attention between two images in order to follow the action. What ultimately Neshat presents is an allegorical dual between a group of white-shirted men occupying a fortress and a group of black-veiled women outside in a natural landscape. The fortress represents a typically masculine space in which individuals are confined by an endless and absurd series of walls and barriers. By way of contrast, the women are depicted first praying in the barren desert, then migrating to the seaside where they commence pushing a heavy boat and sail away, a kind of escape toward an unidentifiable destination. Whether this departure signifies an act of suicide or one of liberation, it embodies an idea of courage and self-determination.

Passage (2001, 11:30 min)

In making Passage, a collaboration with American composer Philip Glass, Neshat aspired to a command of form through a minimalist approach, simplifying her filmic language. The result is an allegorical work that opens itself to diverse interpretations while retaining as its primary theme the inevitability of certain cycles: new and old, death and rebirth, darkness and light.

Passage aims to intrigue the viewer from the opening shot, an image of a pristine beach across which a group of black-suited men carry a corpse, beginning a long and difficult journey that takes them to a barren landscape, and finally to a desert burial site. Soon thereafter, in the center of the desert, we see a group of black-veiled women concentrating furiously on a bare-handed excavation of the rocky ground. Their laborious, rhythmic breathing, accompanied by a primal chant, suggests the labor of birth, the sexual act, or a communal ritual. Only in the final shot of the film are all the elements shown in the same frame. Passage is a visual poem in which Neshat uses symbolism to meditate on tradition and tell the story of human loss, grief, hope, and renewal in the face of existential mystery, wonderment, and awe.

Roja (2016, 17 min)

Roja traces an Iranian woman’s disquieting attempts at connection with American culture while reconciling her identification with her home country. This piece is inspired by scenes from one of Neshat’s own recurring dreams with a dark undertone of her own sense of uprootedness and solitary detachment as she has been living in a state of self-exile since 1996.  In Roja, Neshat visualizes her longing to return to her mother and motherland, while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of such a homecoming ever coming true.

The notions of ‘flight’ and ‘levitation’, implying freedom and ecstasy, are significant aspects of Roja, which are recurring themes in Neshat’s work.

Sarah (2016, 13 min)

Sarah is an unfolding journey of a woman as she recollects and breathes annihilation, while facing residues of destruction, violence, genocide, and mortality in a state of dream. Sarah’s anxieties and fears at last force her to plunge into imagining her own death. While not restricted to any particular time or place, the work is intended to reference a collective sense of anxiety and fear, part of the global experience in a world fraught with conflict.  Sarah is an effort to make sense of the more subliminal emotional and psychic universe that lives deep inside of us, but is difficult to explain through words.

The Fury (2023)

In a highly fictionalized and stylized way, The Fury addresses the sexual exploitation of women as political prisoners.  Subjected to severe torture, sexual assault, including rape, it is commonly known that even after being released, many of the women are unable to recover emotionally from the trauma experienced in prison, and often commit suicide. The video traces the psychological and emotional journey of a young Iranian woman, who, although now lives freely in the United States, remains traumatized by her memories in captivity.

The program is curated by Abirami Logendran.

About the artist

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat works and continues to experiment with the mediums of photography, video and film, which she imbues with highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives that question issues of power, religion, race, gender and the relationship between the past and present, East and West, individual and collective through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian woman living in exile.

Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museo Correr, Venice, Italy; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

She has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017), and most recently Land of Dreams, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival (2021). Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006) and in 2017, she received the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award in Tokyo. She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in London.