Exhibitions
Even In Paradise
George Alexander
Shirin Neshat creates vivid spectacles of austere beauty. Since 1993 her open-ended poetic work has embodied the tensions of contemporary Muslim society as she experienced them, as a Tehran-born New York artist.
When Neshat travelled to America in 1974 to study art, she had no idea that the Iran of Shah Pahlavi would undergo a cultural transformation under fundamentalist Islamic rule. In 1990, following the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, she returned to her homeland, experiencing dislocation at the contrast between the Iran of her childhood—a culture still connected with Persia—and contemporary Iran. The new landscape, with its arresting images of women shrouded head-to-toe in the black chador (which had been abolished back in 1936), ignited her mature work. Neshat was moved not only by the gap between Western stereotypes and the reality of life in Iran, but also between public and private lives there (where 63% of all university students happen to be women, and relationships between men and women are more cooperative and less competitive than in the West). In the teeth of Western materialism, Neshat was able to appreciate Islamic spirituality without being personally subject to the social and sexual mandates of Islamic law.
At 33 Neshat began Women Of Allah (1993–7), her series of black and white photographs of Muslim women in chador with guns. Sensuous and passive, the women also look capable of violence and action. In these large-format images, calligraphic texts – some religious, some poetic—are handwritten over heavily-kohled eyes, the soles of feet or the hands, or over the face in place of the veil. The Farsi texts combine a nearly eroticised decorativeness with the deadly force of inscription.
In 1996 Neshat started working with large-scale video projection. Her trilogy of twin video projection installations—Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000)—engages the viewer with lushly filmed allegories on the male/female dynamic in Islamic societies. Neshat shoots on film, which she then transfers to video, a practice shared by Doug Aitken, Bill Viola and William Kentridge, among others. Video projection is closer to film than television, and a long way away from the old kind of video art that was anchored to a small monitor and whose low-resolution image was worn as a badge of honour against mainstream cinema and television. However, Neshat’s work also challenges movie-goer expectations of narrative resolution and spectacle. Her installations typically involve simultaneous projections on opposing walls. Ping-ponging between screens the viewer becomes part of the action. In shifting the viewer’s balance, Neshat mixes empathy and distance, inner and outer space, in new and not always comfortable ways. The use of dual projection enacts the artist’s themes, embodying a bi-location between East and West, identification and detachment, subject and object; a split consciousness. Sitting on the boundary between East and West, this double framework lets the work destabilise many of the cliches that people have about the status of women under Islam.
In Turbulent, Neshat split the action between screens on opposite walls, with groups of men on one side and women on the other. The men and women take turns silently watching each other, performing aching love songs or a litany of calls. There is almost a kind of gender apartheid here, as they join us in watching, taking turns in being the object of each other’s gaze. The music and visuals are mesmerising and the viewer’s space, the gap between the projections, charged with feeling. In Rapture, the frontal stares of the women give them a power, a complexity and even an autonomy denied to the men. They engage the viewer and demand justice. The tense, dark gallery, and the split between image-track and soundtrack, has the effect of making the outdoors seem cruelly claustrophobic. In Fervor, a man preaches in a room where men in white are separated by a curtain from women in black. In the mass of black robes, a high shot reveals one female face looking back over her shoulder. The formal contrast between black and white is underlined by the juxtaposition of the individual and collective.
The political power of the crowd is significant in the East, where emotions are often experienced collectively. High-crane shots reveal the bodies of men in white shirts and black trousers choreographed against the blank page of stark settings in Morocco or Mexico. Women clad black from head to toe boldly break up a bare landscape. Like inky marks and punctuation within the frame, bodies become a calligraphy. Crowds mass in knots of violent tension (dark heads against white shirts circle a martyr or victim), form into voluptuous coils, huddle in circles for prayer, or crouch like black boulders by the sea. Formally stunning, the work speaks its messages in the movement and organisation of bodies, as well as the junction and disjunction of the projections.
Shot in Oaxaca, Mexico, in contrasting tones of greenish sepia, Tooba (2002) deftly mixes the political with the poetic. It was inspired by fellow United States exile Shahrnoush Parsipour’s 1989 novel Women without Men. Parsipour’s books are banned in Iran, where she has been imprisoned for her writing four times. Tooba is the name of a sacred tree mentioned in the Koran, which can offer shelter and blessings in place of Mahomet to those in need. In Parsipour’s novels women’s bodies are often buried under trees as a way of maintaining fertility while resisting sexual oppression. Neshat’s film abstracts and compresses the novelist’s work and makes it into a mystical fable of transformation. The precise editing and dissolves, the slow pans and haunting music allow metamorphosis to be part of its transcendent order. Neshat places the tree in an enclosed garden as a Persian sign of a soul longing for paradise in the midst of a sterile landscape, as well as a quest for political power. The invading men and women seek refuge in this paradise garden, just as the woman vanishes inside the Tooba tree, acknowledging that there are tensions and conflicts even in paradise.
Neshat’s films are cyclical, metaphorical, non-linear narratives that contain both the specific and the oblique. So much is said with a shot of a crowd set against a close-up of a weathered face. She articulates the difficult border not only between men and women, secular and sacred, but between what can be said and the unsayable.