Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat's artworks can easily look familiar in the eyes of a Mideastern woman. She beautifully narrates the unheard tales of Iranian women and their struggles with identity, their bodies and their social status.
In her photographic series, Neshat captures the non-violent, non-militaristic, and above all, aesthetic nature of Iranian women’s resistance. Concentrating on the complex textual relations between body and veil, she transcribes Persian calligraphic script, often exquisitely rebellious poetry by pioneering women poets, on the exposed faces, hands, and feet in her photographs. Giving voice to the body and body to the voice, she memorialized Iranian women’s defiance at the same time as she launched her own artistic career. (Milani, 2001)
Speechless, Shirin Neshat, 1996
Unveiling, Offered Eyes, Shirin Neshat, 1993
Neshat revisited her homeland repeatedly and became more and more interested in the “question of the separation of the sexes and its relationship to the issue of social control and ideology. A paradoxical blend of conformity and revolt, of accommodation and protest, of acquiescence and resistance. Both are a response to the curtailment of women’s access to the public domain. (Milani, 2001)
Women of Allah, Untitled, Shirin Neshat, 1996
Fervor, Shirin Neshat, 2002
Fervor, Shirin Neshat, 2002
"So though Fervor is about the way life is lived in Iran, it is not, as art, just about Iran. It is about us, as human being whose erotic makeup is the same in every meridian. It addresses a “comprehensive truth” of the human spirit, that it is fulfilled with love. It is about sexual attraction, certainly among “the deepest interest of mankind”. And it shows how lovers encounter conflicts with the commandments that cover fidelity and infidelity. As a work of art, Fervor is what Kant calls an “aesthetic idea”-an idea, hence something conceptual- which the artist has found a way of presenting through sense and feelings. That is what Hegel means by “the freedom of conceptual thinking.” There are no rules that connect ideas with feelings in the creation of art. Spirit is mind as creative force, able to find ways of embodying thought in feelings. A documentary records a truth; a work of art finds ways of presenting to the mind what cannot be shown directly. And it requires Spirit -or wit- in its viewers, to find and infer the idea form its mode of presentation. It is in this way that philosophy and revealed religion work together in Neshat’s art to convey to her viewers, independent of their cultural situation, the deep truths of the human spirit." (Danto and Abramovic, 2010)
References:
Danto, A.C. and Abramovic, M. (2010). Shirin Neshat. New York (Etc) Rizzoli.
Milani, F. (2001). Shirin Neshat. Translated by G. Bernocchi. Milano: Edizioni Charta.