Sovereign Remedy

Rapture is an installation of two synchronized black-and-white videos, projected onto opposing walls in a darkened room. Neshat directed both videos in Essaouira, Morocco - a locale used famously by Orson Welles in his filming of Othello - and Sussan Deyhim's astonishing score accompanies them. One video is an account of a legion of self-involved men carrying on within their remote fortress by the sea; the other tracks a chorus of nearly one hundred unsheltered women roaming an infertile landscape somewhere beyond the castle walls. Neshat has set the scene so that the men are wound tightly around their own inward focus, utterly centered on performing a litany of rituals and entirely dependent on the imposing stronghold to express their identity. In obvious contrast, the women are uncomplicated and uninhibited. Looking out onto and ultimately beyond the landscape, the women shape their own providence. When there is occasion for the two groups to notice one another, it is by sequences of call and response, though it is nearly always the women reacting to the men. This kind of rhythm drives the two stories in fateful directions.

It is the question of destiny - by which I mean not so much giving in to fatalism but the recognition of the larger movements of which we are only dimly aware at a given time - that is really Neshat's subject, and to see this, it best serves us to fast-forward to a passage near the close of Rapture. In the final sequence, the nomadic women, veiled in traditional black chadors, have endured passage across the dreadfully desolate countryside in order to make their way to the ocean's edge. Once they arrive, there is not a moment's hesitation - as if from instinct, six women from the larger cast wade through the shallows to climb into a wretched, hulking boat and head out to sea. Those who do not go aboard either help to push the lumbering boat into the surf or caringly watch over the exodus from shore. My final memory of the film was of this pitiful but intrepid vessel, climbing and sliding back down the heaving swells, edging its way toward the horizon. The six have surely departed on an uncertain voyage, or have they? Neshat provides no denouement, but instead gestures toward a destiny yet to emerge from a complex field of possibilities. Things are far too lyrical and mysterious in Rapture to allow any certain fate to be ascribed. If the departure of the six women represents escape at any cost, then we have just witnessed - as have, presumably, the men in the castle - an act of expediency; if what we've seen is an act of suicide, it does not matter. If the women are engaged in migration, then all is lost; if liberation from repression is at hand, things are ultimately doomed (no matter how poetic the action). If it is the sacrifice of the many for the few, there may be hope for salvation; if it is the sacrifice of the few for the many, it is martyrdom.

In Rapture, the destiny of the protagonists is perpetually unsettled - it could be said that it is as unresolved in the highly allegorical world Neshat has imagined as it is in the gritty world of Khatami and the students who rally against the pace of his government's reforms. Yes, half of Iran's university population is now women, and a certain number of them are being teargassed for expressing opinions undoubtedly hatched by the university education they have only recently been able to attain. It's all relative, and relativity, in that kind of dosage, stings as long as the ultimate outcome of Khatami's reform government remains in question. Capable of evoking the problem of gender in a field of geopolitical speculation without being ground down beneath the abstract ideology of any particular politics (gender or otherwise), Neshat's allegory in Rapture possesses a reach far beyond her earlier work. Her accomplishment with the video causes me to think straightaway of William Kentridge's poetic reflection on the legacy of apartheid. Even of James Baldwin.