Shirin Neshat: Islamic Counterpoints

Art in America, Oct, 2001 by Amei Wallach

Neshat's emergence as a maker of film and video installations coincided with the flowering of Iranian film in the 1990s. She has enormous regard for Abbas Kiarostami and other directors who are compelled to create their effects out of cramped means, since the government monopolizes film stock and sets censorship rules. Instead of being hampered by the control, Kiarostami uses the limitations as an opportunity to make films that, he says, build gently and "disturb you afterwards ... keep you preoccupied for weeks."[4] To achieve her own stringent spell, Neshat sets limits for herself. Since she conceives the films as a visual artist, her images are disciplined and consistently compelling. The films that succeed do so not only because of the clarity of their concept but because she distills images for esthetic resonance. There is no dialogue to carry the scenes, and every frame counts. She treats the chador like sculpture, a black mound against the sand, a congregation of humped forms making a pattern, a background against which the white of a hand is newly seen as intimate and unpredictable. She makes visual references to Donald Judd's serial Minimalism, Louise Bourgeois's engorged body parts, Andreas Gursky's thronged humanity.

Sometimes now, an Iranian film will restate her images--the multiple women in chadors on bicycles in Marziyeh Meshkini's The Day I Became a Woman (2000) recall the multiple women in chadors dancing in Neshat's Rapture. In both cases, Neshat believes, the intent is the same; to "deconstruct the subject by taking it into a new context, out of the purely political and into the philosophical and poetic."[5]

Neshat's relationship to her subject matter is both complicated and enriched by the fact of her exile. Exile is a philosophical and emotional state. It has little to do with the length of time one has been away from home. The loss is invariably lifelong.

Exile as a Language

Exile is one of the overwhelming facts of the 20th century. In finding a form for the divided inner life of exile, Neshat has created a language that millions can comprehend. Edward Said describes the state this way:

Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that--to borrow a phrase from music--is contrapuntal.

For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally.[6]

The shuttling glance and divided self of exile are the language of Neshat's work. However, she has visited exile head-on as subject matter only once, in the film installation Soliloquy (1999), introduced at the last Carnegie International. Soliloquy is her most problematic work, in part because it tries to do so many things at once that it clouds her esthetic, which is best when most crystalline. The film turns out, however, to have been a petri dish that incubated the ideas she has developed in her newest work.