PHOTO:Shirin Neshat -Our House is On Fire

The photographic prophetic project ”Our House is On Fire”, of the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, who lives and works in New York (she studied in California), where she documents and reports a social, historical and political reality, 3 years ago looked like a local issue with limited dimensions, nowadays after the attacks of 13 November in Paris, looks like that really our house is on fire and this phenomenon has received international and certainly rampant dimensions…

By Efi Michalarou

Neshat told Newsweek that “Our House Is on Fire” stems from the death and destruction she saw in Cairo, including the corpses of ‘’Young men and women and little children with tags on their feet”, when she traveled there to work in 2012. During that trip, Neshat’s colleague on the project, photographer Larry Barnes, was mourning the unexpected death of his daughter, further prompting Neshat’s desire to explore how people deal with pain on both a personal and national level, she says. Neshat asked Egyptians in the street vendors and mechanics, rather than high profile politicians or militants to share their stories about the revolution as she photographed them. The portraits are direct and close-up. “When you stand in front of the images, you are faced with someone else’s pain”, she says. Neshat’s recognition became more international in 1999, when she won the International Award of the 48th Venice Biennale with “Turbulent” and “Rapture”, a project involving almost 250 extras and produced by the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont which met with critical and public success after its worldwide avant-première at the Art Institute of Chicago in May 1999. With “Rapture”, Neshat tried for the first time to make pure photography with the intent of creating an aesthetic, poetic, and emotional shock. “Games of Desire”, a video and still-photography piece, was displayed between 3/9-3/10/09 at the Gladstone Gallery in Brussels before moving in November to the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont in Paris. The film, which is based in Laos, centers on a small group of elderly people who sing folk songs with sexual lyrics – a practice which had been nearing obsolescence. In 2009 she won the Silver Lion for best director at the 66th Venice Film Festival for her directorial debut ‘’Women Without Men’’, based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel of the same name. She said about the movie: “This has been a labour of love for six years”.