Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat (born March 26, 1957, Qazvīn, Iran) is an Iranian-born American artist whose photography, video, and feature films investigate how women find freedom in repressive societies. About her work, Neshat stated: “Everything I’ve done is a celebration of the power of women. The Western world sometimes views Iranian women as victims, and while they’ve been continuously oppressed by religion and difficult political situations, they’ve always fought back. They’ve always broken rules.”

Early life and education

Neshat, the fourth of five children, was born in Qazvīn, Iran, a small city northwest of Tehrān. Her parents—her father was a doctor and her mother a housewife—were supporters of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the shah (king) of Iran. His social and legal reforms furthered the emancipation and enfranchisement of women, and the couple insisted that their three daughters receive an education. Neshat attended a Catholic boarding school in Tehrān and then emigrated to the United States in 1975 to finish her studies. She graduated from the painting program at the University of California, Berkeley, with a B.A. degree in 1979 and an M.F.A. degree in 1982.

Meanwhile in Iran, widespread dissatisfaction with the shah led in 1978 to the growth of support for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shiʿi religious leader living in exile in Paris. In 1979 revolutionaries toppled the monarchy and established an Islamic republic. Khomeini was named rahbar, Iran’s political and religious leader for life. That same year, the Iran hostage crisis (1979–81) caused the United States and Iran to end diplomatic ties. The instability of Iran was further compounded with Iraq’s invasion in 1980, making it difficult for Neshat to contact her family. She found herself stranded in her adopted country. In 1983 Neshat moved to New York City and eventually began working at Storefront for Art and Architecture. The exhibition and performance space was founded in 1982 by Korean artist and activist Kyong Park, whom Neshat soon married (they divorced in 1998). She took a hiatus from making art to jointly run the space with her husband and to raise their son, Cyrus Park (whose name refers to Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenian Empire in Persia).

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Women of Allah

In 1990, two years after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Neshat was finally able to return to Iran. The country that she had once considered progressive had been transformed into one whose conservative policies seemingly dictated a woman’s every move. Perhaps one of the most visible manifestations of the change was the prevalence of women veiling in public, as required by law. To Neshat, who had witnessed the women’s liberation movement in the United States during the 1970s—indeed, to many in the West—the act of veiling was a symbol of oppression. Yet to a number of women in Iran, who had once dressed in European fashions, the act of veiling could be liberating, protecting them from becoming the object of the male gaze.

When Neshat returned to the United States, she began making art in an attempt to reconcile the two versions of her country. She created Women of Allah (1993–97), a series of black-and-white photographs in which she is pictured wearing a chador. The garment conceals her hair, neck, and body, leaving only her face and hands exposed, and onto her uncovered skin Neshat wrote in Farsi. The texts are drawn from the writings of contemporary Iranian authors, including Tahereh Saffarzadeh. In the photograph Rebellious Silence (1994) the long barrel of a rifle bisects Neshat’s body, while in Faceless (1994) she points a revolver at the viewer. Although Westerners might think of veiling as a form of oppression, Neshat does not appear submissive in the photographs. She boldly meets the viewer’s gaze in each photo while holding a weapon, giving her a sense of power. Indeed, to many women who participated in the Islamic Revolution, veiling was a form of empowerment. It was a symbol of the Islamic culture that they felt was denied under the shah in his efforts to Westernize Iran. Yet that sense of empowerment began to feel like a contradiction in the wake of the shrinking freedoms under the new Islamic republic, which mandated veiling in 1983. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the photographs have become more provocative than Neshat originally intended. When she was working in the 1990s, she was thinking about Western stereotypes and the contradictions of the Islamic Revolution. Her series, however, does not pass judgment on veiling or the revolution itself. It exposes the complexities and paradoxes with which Iranian women have since contended.

Turbulent and other short films

In 1996 Neshat’s art was banned in Iran, and she has considered herself an exile since then. Toward the end of the decade her practice took the form of two-screen black-and-white video installations. One of her first pieces, Turbulent (1998), examines the ways in which Iranian women, who are forbidden from singing solo in public, can challenge authority to give themselves a voice. The work creates a visual juxtaposition between a screen showing a man performing for a male audience and another screen depicting a veiled woman facing an empty hall. When the man finishes a song by 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, the crowd applauds, and he turns to watch the woman. She begins with a low hum that gradually builds to a powerful syncopated chant and then transforms into a mournful melody that is punctuated with guttural intonations and high-pitch wails. The wordless piece is stunning, leaving the man and his audience silent. It sharply contrasts with the man’s lovely but traditional performance. Because the woman is able to transcend her limitations, Turbulent leaves the viewer wondering who exactly is the repressed individual. So, while Neshat examines such binaries as male and female, modern and traditional, and secular and religious, her work does not pick a side between these dichotomies. Instead, it reveals the ambiguities in between. Turbulent was shown at the 1999 Venice Biennale and won a Golden Lion.

Neshat continued to work with the group of Iranian expatriates with whom she had collaborated on Turbulent. The team included composer Sussan Deyhim, who created and performed the woman’s vocalization; cinematographer and writer Ghasem Ebrahimian; and Shoja Azari, who played the male singer and with whom Neshat began a long-term relationship. He was later credited as a writer, director, or editor in most of her videos or films. In Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000), Neshat built on the visuals and themes of Turbulent, creating ambiguous narratives between women on one screen and men on another. In Rapture, one projection shows hundreds of men, all dressed in Western-style white shirts and black pants, moving about a stone fortress while the opposite screen displays hundreds of women, dressed in chadors, chanting, praying, and eventually launching a boat into the sea. Fervor observes a man and a woman whose paths intersect and diverge in public and religious spaces.

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In 2001 Neshat collaborated with American composer Philip Glass on the short film Passage, which follows a funeral procession across a beach, while nearby a group of women dressed in chadors dig a grave with their hands. Neshat also continued making video installations, including Soliloquy (1999), Possessed (2001), Pulse (2001), and Tooba (2002).

Women Without Men, other works, and awards

In 2009 Neshat made her feature film debut with Women Without Men (Zanan-e bedun-e mardan). The movie was based on the magical realist novel (1989) by Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur, with whom Neshat wrote the script. It follows four Iranian women whose lives intersect in 1953, the year an American- and British-backed coup overthrew Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and reinstated the shah as leader. The film was shown at the 66th annual Venice International Film Festival, and Neshat won the Silver Lion for best director. She is the only person to have won both a Silver Lion and a Golden Lion. The film was accompanied by a series of video installations investigating the psychologies of the four main characters. Neshat’s other feature films include Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017), in which an exiled Iranian director (a character Neshat likens to herself) attempts to tell the story of one of the 20th century’s most famous Arab singers, and Land of Dreams (2021), which follows an Iranian woman working for the U.S. Census Bureau to record American citizens’ dreams.

Neshat continued to take photographs, including commissions for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York, documenting the aftermath of the Egypt uprising of 2011 (Our House Is on Fire, 2013) and for the National Portrait Gallery, London, of Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai (2018). Neshat also directed Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida (with Riccardo Muti conducting) at the 2017 Salzburg Festival. In 2022 she created a digital piece that projects two of her photographs from the Women of Allah series in London’s Piccadilly Circus and at Pendry West Hollywood in Los Angeles. Both photographs, Unveiling (1993) and Moon Song (1994), were accompanied by the words “Woman, Life, Freedom,” a slogan from Kurdish activists that was adopted by Iranian protesters following the death of Jina Mahsa Amini on September 16, 2022. The 22-year-old Kurdish woman died three days after being arrested by Iran’s so-called morality police for allegedly wearing her headscarf too loosely. Neshat also signed an open letter supporting the protests.

In addition to her Golden Lion and Silver Lion, Neshat was the recipient of the Japan Art Society’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale (2017). Her work was widely exhibited around the world, including retrospectives at the Detroit Institute of Arts (2013), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2015), Washington, D.C., and the Broad Museum (2019–20), Los Angeles.