How feminism and Islam unite in the work of Iranian revolutionary artist Shirin Neshat

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Shirin Neshat is an outstanding Iranian artist and filmmaker whose significance goes far beyond her work. Shirin is involved in politics besides creating lyric films and amazing pictures, exploring the place of Muslim women in Middle Eastern society. Her work has received wide acclaim, from the Golden Lion won at the 1999 Venice Biennale to the prestigious Praemium Imperiale awarded by the Japan Artists' Association.

How Shirin became a revolutionary dissident

The political and religious upheavals in Iran in 1979 were best remembered for the overthrow of the Iranian Shah. Children and grandchildren of the rebellious Muslims who overthrew the monarch began to protest of their own. No, they did not riot in the Iranian streets. But they expressed their grievances around the world through art and literature. One such dissident is Shirin Neshat, a renowned photographer, artist and videographer.

Born in Iran, Neshat came of age in the United States, where she was sent to complete her studies. The revolution broke out when she was already abroad. After consolidating their power, the mullahs leading Iran began to enforce strict codes of conduct that restricted women. In response to this situation, Shirin began to create works that resist repression. Her art is invariably aimed at highlighting the strength and nobility of women living in traditional Muslim societies.

Biography of Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat was born on March 26, 1957 in the city of Qazvin, which is about two hours drive north of Tehran (Iran). Her father was a doctor. The Neshat family belonged to the upper middle class. The girl studied at a Catholic boarding school in Tehran until 1974.

In 1974, her Western father sent his daughter to California to complete her basic education. She later enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees. In 1990, Neshat was able to return to Iran, where she experienced dramatic changes in Iranian society. The transformation was especially concerned with the laws governing the status of women. This became a turning point in her creative activity. More than any living artist, Shirin has demonstrated the place and power of art in confronting and making sense of political crises.

Creation

Shirin dreamed of becoming an artist since childhood. But one day everything changed. One day in 1983, when Shirin Neshat was 26 years old, she literally fled from her boyfriend to New York, leaving all her belongings and dozens of paintings, prints and collages that she created during her studies at the University of California at Berkeley. From this institution, Shirin received her bachelor's degree and then her master's degree in fine arts.

Shirin describes the work she left that day as “very bad, clichéd” attempts to combine the Persian culture of her native Iran with Western painting traditions. “I was useless in art school,” she says. “Artistically, nothing happened for me. At that moment, a whole chapter of my life was destroyed."

Shirin's photographs (their cost varies from 2.5 million rubles to 10 million rubles) are exhibited in galleries around the world. She has received numerous international prizes. For example, the Golden Lion award, which she won as Best Artist at the 1999 Venice Biennale for her short film Turbulence (which explores the different roles assigned to men and women in Iran).

Ten years later, she received the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival for her first feature film, Women Without Men, which critic Peter Bradshaw described as "a calm, stunning film that captures both heart and mind." In the same year, The Huffington Post named her the Artist of the Decade.

Her series of photographs "Women of Allah", created in the mid-1990s, presents characteristic themes of her work, in which she explores the conditions of male, female, public, private, religious, political and secular identity, both in Iranian and in western cultures.

Shirin, now 63, has never returned to painting, but has shot several series of photographs and feature films. Her works are lyrical, fabulous reflections on the place of women in Iranian society, on two very different cultures - Eastern and Western, which have shaped her life.

Shirin did not ignore the consequences of historical political events - revolutions, coups, uprisings. She is a skilled image maker who secretly communicates powerful political messages. Her creations seduce viewers with the beauty of the visual style and music that accompanies videos and films, and then make them think deeply about the most pressing issues of our time.