SHIRIN NESHAT

“I’ve been careful in all my exploration (...) not to point fingers, but I feel it’s almost come to the point where that lack of a position is itself taking a position”.

Faces, eyelids, hands and feet covered with lines from medioeval arab poets. Women with a deep dark gaze embracing rifles. These are  the pictures of the sery “Women of Allah”, which made the Iranian Shirin Neshat famous all over the world and which still accompany – more than ten years later – the western representation of women in the Islamic society. The work of Shirin Neshat – visual artist who refuses to be ranked in one single discipline because, as she says, “I’m nothing entirely, I’m in between” – has remarkably developed since those early works, sincere but a little ingenious and too structured, as she defines them. A work, that of Shirin Neshat, which originates from the urgency to provide with a concrete shape her intolerance for a unilateral vision of the world, for the claim to judge by assuming the own (western) criteria as universal parameters.

Moving away and coming back: a matter of identity

It often happens that who finds himself, forced by the circumstances or for his own will, to leave his country and to start a new life abroad contributes more or less unconsciously to feed a mechanism of conformation and even assimilation to the “hegemon” culture, by accepting cultural models elaborated by others and  for other contexts, trying to find a place in that community. In particular, this mechanism is generally one way and the brand of “western product” seems to guarantee modernity, universality and progress.
She is only 17,  when she arrives at the Berkley University, California; it is 1974, in America the Watergates case (outburst two years before) still rages while in Iran people listens to the radio broadcasting of ayatollah Khomeini from Iraq, calling the return of stricter habits against the secularization of the State carried out by the Shiah.  A few months later the tension will result in a revolution leading to the escape of the Shiah Reza Pahlavi and the return of exiled Khomeyni, who will proclaim himself spiritual guide of the new “Islamic Prepublic”.
While important changes happen in Iran, followed by the war against Iran, Shirin tries to adapt to her new status of immigrant and alone, with no land and no ambitions, she come to live exactly what her Country was living under the Shiah: the collapse of her own identity in another, the Western reality. In such a situation there was no ground for art, because – as she says – the tensions and the clashes out of which art originates were missing; many years later Shirin will remember that period as one of the most difficult of her life.
1990 is a crucial year for the artist, because after sixteen years she goes back to Iran and, in a kind of reverse process of her father’s idealisation of the West, she finds herself supporting the revolution, if not for its effects for the impulse that generated it. At last, Shirin seems to have found her own place and – through the social engagement with her people - to have reconciled  with her identity. It is now that Shirin starts feeling that “activism isn’t such a bad think” and art becomes the natural expression of this new awareness.

“I’m really interested in social justice, and if an artist has a certain power of being heard and voicing something important, it’s right to do it. It could still be done in such a way that it’s not aggressive or overly didactic. I’m trying to find that form”.

The poetic

The return to Iran is for Shirin Neshat a return to herself and the artist regrets having missed - by moving to the United States - the difficult years of the revolution lived by her people.
Shirin thus starts idealizing Islam and individuates in the “women of Allah” her favourite subject, the personification of the society’s value system.
Nevertheless, we do not have to think that Shirin’s world aims to invoke the equality of the female population nor to denounce the violence which affects Iranian women’s life. What animates Shirin Neshat’s poetic, on the contrary, is the effort to overturn the assumption - essentially masculine and typically western - that exists only one world and one point of view.
Her early works - among which the photographic series “Women Allah” mentioned above - are moved by the need to believe in something positive about Islam, in order to regain possession of her inner cultural roots and  thus to “justify” its precepts out of the rationality that characterize the western thought. “Maybe to say: this makes no sense according to your, the west’s rationale. But you can’t evaluate those people in your system of thinking”.

Step by step, anyway, the artists experiments a change in her sensibility toward the world and she realises that it rests on a precarious balance of opposites whose unavoidable consequence is the crash. From this moment on, her works (more and more characterized by an interest toward video-art, even though they keep a multi-disciplinary approach that allow the artist to “feel free”) represents the oppositions that rule everyone’s life, but set them in the Islamic society, in its feminine universe where body and public space are bound by strict social controls. The result is a creative tension quite close to drama.

The aesthetic of the opposits

The philosophy of the big oppositions ruling people life finds and immediate and natural aesthetic translation since 1998, with a series of video installations characterized by two opposite screens projecting situations, tensions, states of the body and soul which in their self-evidence are the most direct expression of the constructions and taboos that pervade men and women’s life in the Islamic culture. They are mostly taboos coming from outside but – the artist says – equally insidious are the taboos we bear inside, that we cannot drop even when far from the other’s gaze.
The aim of her artistic research is thus to represent the hypocrisy and the absurdity of  social constructions and to show how the individual can be both vulnerable and powerful in taking on its own destiny.

Islam offers the artist a fertile ground of reflection, a ground pervaded by the conflict-dialogue between tradition and contemporaneity, old and new, women and men. The matter, in this context, is not to denounce and take a position (behaviour she has always refused), but to move the attention from the stereotypes which characterize the western perception of Islamic culture and of Islamic women in particular. Shirin Neshat could work deeply and consciously on this subject, in her position of western citizen with strong roots in a eastern country (she defined herself as a “transcultural product”), and allowed her to face subjects and taboos with higher freedom and sincereness.


Metaphor and allusion

Although based on the socio-political situation of Iran and of the most significant expressions of Islamic culture, Shirin Neshat's work aims to reach the inner sensibility of people, touching keys which belong to every culture and society because part of the individual perception.
Since the early pictures and until the most recent videos, all Shirin’s work expresses a lush for a communicative but delicate language, not to tell or explain but to suggest. It is not a casualty if one of the major sources  of influence of her poetic is Abbas Kiarostami, Iranian like her and like Shirin able tell compelling truth through a gentle aesthetic, a detachment which makes his films “culturally specific, but he does not feed a fashionable curiosity about Islam”.
As for Kiarostami, the reality becomes abstract and metaphorical like a mental travel that never abandons the capacity of reflecting on the constant struggle for the control of individual’s own destiny.

Even though an evident process of development divides the early from the latter works, what pervades all of them is a deep and disilluded look on the opposite forces acting in everyday’s life and that the Iranian artist expresses with a language rich in poetry.

Her pictures, as well as videos and performances, present us the sexual difference as explicative of the meaning of things that matter in the world. By forcing the spectator to observe two different screens and even breaking the image in two, the artist makes him physical live the opposition between universal but also particular principles (man/woman, east/west, public/private, rational/irrational), declined in different ways according to the different socio-cultural contexts.

By Giulia Guerrini