ART-PRESENTATION: Shirin Neshat-I Will Greet the Sun Again
Throughout her career, Shirin Neshat has constructed poetic worlds in which women and men navigate narratives that mirror interior and political realities. Inside of and against these metaphoric worlds, Neshat studies the specifics of both individual and cultural gestures and poses, often assembling and giving voice to real people who have lived through seismic events of recent history, including the Green Movement in Iran and the Arab Spring in Egypt.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: The Broad Archive
Shirin Neshat left Iran when she was 17 years old to complete her studies at the University of California at Berkeley, after residing initially in Los Angeles. Due to the turbulence of the Islamic Revolution (1978-79) and the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), Neshat continued to live outside of her home country. The exhibition “I Will Greet the Sun Again” (taking its title from a poem by Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad) surveys approximately 30 years of Shirin Neshat’s dynamic video works and photography, investigating the artist’s passionate engagement with ancient and recent Iranian history, the experience of living in exile and the human impact of political revolution. Arranged chronologically the exhibition begins with her most famous body of work, “Women of Allah” (1993-97) and features the global debut of “Land of Dreams” a new, multi-faceted project that was completed this past summer in New Mexico, and encompasses two videos and a body of photographs. The exhibition presents over 230 photographs and 8 video installations, including iconic video works such as “Rapture”, “Turbulent” (both1998) and “Passage” (2001), journeying from works that address specific events in contemporary Iran, both before and after the Islamic Revolution, to work that increasingly uses metaphor and ancient Persian history and literature to reflect on universal concerns of gender, political borders and rootedness. For the first time in a major survey of Neshat’s work, the exhibition will feature all three subsets of Neshat’s iconic photography series, “Women of Allah”. The first wave, called “Unveiling” and evoking the words of Farrokhzad, presents the personal struggles of women caught between religiously rooted social codes and the forces and freedoms of their desires. The second wave finds its main voice in the poet Tahereh Saffarzadeh and navigates Iran’s changing concept of martyrdom—a concept overly simplified and stereotyped by the West. The final and rarely shown, wave in this series was shot on Neshat’s last trip to Iran in 1995, a body of work that features women inside of Iran in various poses of prayer and power. Neshat’s 2001 collaboration with composer Philip Glass, “Passage”, acts as a pivot in the exhibition from Neshat’s early, personal work made specifically about living outside of Iran during some of the most turbulent times in the country’s history to new bodies of work which reflect universally on global political events such as the Arab Spring. Three galleries are devoted to monumental photograph installations of “The Book of Kings” (2012), “Our House Is on Fire” (2013), and “The Home of My Eyes” (2015), a series of portraits shot in Azerbaijan. Never-before-seen in USA, “The Home of My Eyes” was on view at the Museo Correr during the 57th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2017 after debuting in Baku, Azerbaijan. The second half of the exhibition features selections from Neshat’s most recent work, including the films “Illusions” and Mirrors” (2016) and “Roja” (2016), and an ambitious, new work, “Land of Dreams”, which was completed this summer and is making its global debut in the exhibition. “Land of Dreams” examines the ephemeral nature of dreams as a window into the anxieties of the political moment, functioning as a critique and satire of both Iranian and American political systems while also showing the shared humanity and vulnerability of those living under social, political and economic injustice. The two videos in “Land of Dreams” feature an Iranian woman, Simin, making her way through the western United States as a photographer. In the process of her work, she not only collects portraits, but also the dreams of her American subjects, which she takes back to be logged at a mysterious colony. Land of Dreams also includes a new group of portraits of Americans of different backgrounds, ages and genders from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Farmington in the Navajo Nation, to Las Vegas, Nevada.
Info: Curator: Ed Schad, The Broad, 221 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, Duration: 19/10/19-16/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu 11:00-17:00, Fri-Sat 10:00-20:00, Sun 10:00-18:00, www.thebroad.org
