ART CITIES:Venice-Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat’s powerful photographs and video installations illuminate the gender and cultural conflicts of her native Iran. From her first series of photographs, “Woman of Allah” (1993–97), combines images of women with written words taken from religious texts. Neshat further explored cultural taboos through video and video installations. In 1997, she won the 48th Venice Biennial prize for her film “Turbulent”, which contrasts a man singing in front of an all-male audience, with a woman singing to an empty concert hall.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museo Correr Archive
As a collateral event of the 57th International Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Shirin Neshat’s solo exhibition “The Home of My Eyes” at the Museo Correr feature recent works, including a selection of 26 photographs from the series “The Home of My Eyes” (2015), and her new video “Roja” (2016). These works represent a shift in Neshat’s practice, as they depart from works that focus primarily on her own Iranian society and instead reflect on other cultures. Portraying the diverse people of Azerbaijan, Neshat’s “The Home of My Eyes” series comprises 55 photographic portraits inscribed with ink. The artist conceived of the series as “A portrait of a country that for so long has been a crossroads of many different ethnicities, religions, and languages”. Only separated from Iran in the first half of the 19th century, Azerbaijan especially resonated with Neshat, as it shares much of the same history, religion, ethnicity, and culture with her native country. In the series, Neshat captures the individual character of her subjects in frontal, close-up portraits. While the subjects range in age and ethnicity, Neshat unites them formally by staging them in similar clothing and poses, against a dark background. The series additionally explores the subjects’ individual voices. During production, Neshat spoke with them about their perspectives on cultural identity and the concept of home. Neshat then composed texts, which are calligraphically inscribed across the portraits, from both the sitters’ responses to the notion of homeland, and from poems by Nizami Ganjavi, a 12th century Iranian poet who lived in what is present-day Azerbaijan. In the video “Roja” (2016), Shirin Neshat reflects on her own experience of living in the foreign culture of the United States. “Roja” is based on Neshat’s personal dreams and memories, traces an Iranian woman’s nostalgia for her homeland. The protagonist is simultaneously pulled towards and pushed away from both her original and adopted homes. Employing a surrealist lens and nonlinear narrative, the work captures feelings of displacement, blurred lines between reality and fiction, and tensions between the past and present.
Info: Curator: Thomas Kellein, Museo Correr, San Marco, Venice, Duration: 13/5-26/11/17, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-19:00 (1/4-31/10) & 10:00-17:00 (1/11-31//3), http://correr.visitmuve.it
