In America there are opportunities for women today that create a sense of gender equality among the sexes despite the underlying issue of wage differentiations. The roles that women assume for themselves are no longer prescribed, but they can be subscribed. The women’s movement ratified the idea of gender roles since women have been oppressed by a society that bestowed privilege to men. Now, American society encourages that men and women share privilege in households, in workforces, in politics, etc., toward the goal of eliminating gender discrimination. The homogenous mix of gender privilege seems radical in the face of some non-Western cultures, especially in the Middle East. Shirin Neshat, an Iranian artist who left Iran in 1975 for education in America, channels notions of gender restrictions, which are enforced in Iran since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Neshat found artistic purpose in exploring how Islamic fundamentalism changed Iranian women by veiling them and exchanging the value of an Iranian women’s movement for martyrdom and silence. She also evokes ideas about sexual friction from an Iranian perspective, where in Islamic fundamentalism even shared spaces between men and women is censured.
The Iranian culture that Shirin Neshat experienced and the transience that changed the culture she knew motivated her to approach the subject of Iranian women living in an Islamic Republic. Although she studied art at the University of California, Berkeley and obtained both undergraduate and graduate degrees, she had not been working as an artist for ten years before she found the inspiration for her acclaimed photographic series and video installations. According to the essay Double Vision by John B. Ravenal, she “abandoned art around the time that she moved to New York in 1983.” (Ravenal 448) The subject was not only something she wanted to explore for herself, as a displaced Iranian woman, but also as a means to try and challenge the Western stereotypes of Middle Eastern women. Neshat carefully assembles the Iranian woman’s play on liberation and rebellion without evoking images of women shedding their hijabs and chadors. She manages to avoid all cliché ideas of protest for a poised and emotional convention that only an Iranian woman artist could manage to do out of utter respect, mystified by her own culture.
In 1993, Women of Allah became Neshat’s first exploration of the post-revolution Iranian woman. Neshat built her Women of Allah series over the next four years with many photographs. She created black and white images that dramatized ideas of women enveloped in Islamic fundamentalism. There is an exotic and beautiful quality to these women, which is complicated by the culture’s suppressive attitude toward sensuality. Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian-American historian and culture critic, wrote an essay titled Bordercrossings: Shirin Neshat’s Body of Evidence in which he describes, “By far the most powerful set of binary oppositions now visually collapsing in Shirin Neshat’s work is sanctity and sensuality.” (Goldberg 37) Some of the most recognizable of these show a woman wearing the traditional Islamic chador focally engaged with the camera toting a gun, as in the photograph Rebellion Silence. With this series, Neshat not only began exploring a new subject, she began using photography for the first time to realize her subject. Although Neshat spent her college years studying painting, she incorporated it into her work by painting text directly onto the enlarged photographs.
“She covered the parts of the photograph that expose parts of her body (which by Islamic law were confined to feet, hands and face) with inscriptions of Farsi poetry written by Iranian women such as Forough Farokhzad and Tahereh Saffarzadeh. The poems range in content from explorations of female desires and fears to militant calls for women’s participation in the Iranian revolution.” (Heartney 232)
The woman that is the central figure in most of her black and white photographs is Neshat herself. By portraying herself in this way, she takes a more personal approach in her manifestation of the post-revolution Iranian woman. This could be a response to her never actually having endured the transitions that resulted from the revolution. Other recognizable photographs include the images of hands and feet decorated with Persian texts as mentioned above. Again, a gun barrel is often incorporated peering out from between the hands and feet, as in her photographs titled Guardians of Revolution and Allegiance with Wakefulness. These photographs are believed to be evoking a call for martyrdom and their titles are indicative of this. The violence associated in her work, with the incorporation of guns and ideas of martyrdom, is often seen as being controversial. The discussed controversies surrounding Neshat’s work include the question of applicable stereotypes and Neshat’s intentions. Dabashi, adds to this discussion having written in his essay:
“The criticism leveled against Shirin Neshat by some Iranians, Muslims, or in general by those who advocate the cause of the “Third World”, is that she takes advantage of and thus reinforces the existing stereotypes of Muslim women and as a result perpetuates that image.” (Goldberg 43)
That image is perhaps one of oppression, victimization, disobedience, exoticism or armed protectors of Islam. Perhaps, it is all of these. It is important to note that not all of her photographs incorporate guns; they seem to be especially absent in several photographs where Neshat is shown with a child. Faith and Bonding are two photographs that show a pair of decorated hands holding the hands of a child. In these photographs, Neshat creates images that can be universally interpreted as mother and child and protector of innocence. Neshat’s Women of Allah is a complex array of photographs with unconfirmed meanings that for a Western audience appeals to its curiosities and challenges its tendency to question and speak-out about the revoke of women’s rights in the Middle East.
Neshat’s first major success arose from her first video installations, including Turbulent (1998) and Rapture (1999). In 1999, Turbulent and Rapture won the International Award of the XLVIII Biennial of Venice, which brought International attention to Neshat’s work. In keeping with her signature-dramatized images, Neshat shot these films for video installation in black and white. Ravenal’s essay Double Vision explains, “Each of these short (ten to thirteen minutes long) black-and-white pieces explores a different facet of fundamentalist Islam’s social segregation of men and women.” As Ravenal mentions, with these video installations Neshat moves away from exploring the existence of the post-revolution woman and begins tapping on the idea of gender roles by exploring the contrast between men and women in post-revolutionary Iran’s public arena. However, because of national acceptance concerns, Neshat was not able to actually use Iran as the background for her films. Instead, she filmed in Istanbul, Turkey, and the Moroccan port town of Essaouira. (Heartney 449)
Turbulent is composed of two videos, which together provide a glimpse of both the male and female perspective on the public performance of song in a theater house. The film is shot from behind the man and woman on two videos, which for the viewer creates a type of voyeur perspective as though one were watching from back stage. Revenal’s account of the video installation describes the two screens facing each other, each with a 1950’s vintage microphone set on the stage. While it has been noted in other reviews that the two screens faced each other, there have been instances, such as its exhibition in November 2006 at the Hunter Art Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the screens were shown side-by-side. The screens facing each other seems more appropriate for developing a further static construction of the circumstances between the man and the woman. Ravenal further points out, “the experience of being caught between the facing projections suggests that viewers are not only observers but also observed.” The man sings first and his song is an Iranian love song. Ravenal cited: “His impassioned song is a traditional expression of divine love based on a thirteenth-century Sufi poem by Persian mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi.” (Heartney 500) In contrast to the man’s conventional performance amid an all male audience on screen, the woman is shown on the other screen alone in the theater. Instead of singing, it sounds as if she is bellowing, and the tonal quality is like that of an animal’s call for warning. As she projects these sounds, absent of melody, the camera circles around her and gains momentum as her performance strengthens. When she finishes, there is only silence, and the men continue to stare out from the other screen. Neshat’s Turbulent is a stunning and captivating display of gender segregation in the public arena, which is very much on the surface of the Iranian male-female experience.
In Rapture, Neshat develops the issue of gender segregation in a more blatant way in that she uses crowds of men and women in a juxtaposition of settings. As in Turbulent, Neshat uses the same convention of dual screens facing each other with men occupying one screen and women occupying the other. The men are shown in an urban setting, moving through the streets in a pack, eventually congregating in a fortification structure. The women, shown on the opposite screen, appear out in a desert. They move toward the camera. Neshat develops a scenario of interaction between the two videos. The men are performing “activities that mostly suggest rehearsal of tradition or release of aggressive tension” and the women “let out a startling kell, a high pitched ululating sound…” that can be heard by the men on the other screen. Ravenal describes the response:
“The men immediately stop their fighting and look across to the women, who turn away from the camera and begin a journey back across the desert to the sea. Once there, they struggle to launch a wooden boat, and six of them set out upon the waves… A parting view shows the men waving from the ramparts.” (Heartney 451)
The communication between the men and the women is reduced to no more than the women’s kell and the men’s waving. By leaving, the women further remove themselves from the men to embrace nature, while the men are left to the confinement of walls. The idea of gender segregation in Rapture is not simply that the genders would occupy separate spaces, but that they would acknowledge each other in a state of otherness, somewhat desensitized having an opportunity to respond but never really doing so. The viewer is left to the awkward space in between.
(The first two video's shown in the video below are glimpses at Neshat's Turbulent and Rapture. Rapture is shown first, then Turbulent.)
Neshat’s body of work has grown considerably and the artistic dialogues that have been introduced continually expand off of Islamic fundamentalism, gender and personal struggle. Some of these works include, Fervor (2000), Passage (2001), Logic of Birds (2001), Tooba (2002), The Last Word (2003) and Zarin (2005). With Passage, Neshat introduces color to her films making a break from the trademark black and white image that further characterized her subjects providing that eerie dual sensory. Neshat continues to explore the genre of performance art with video and evolves artistically through it. This medium provides a space for more dialogue than that of her signature Women of Allah. Her work has never been shown in Iran or other Islamic countries; because of this, Neshat is not likely a celebrated artist within her native country. Therefore, the subject of the post-revolution Iranian women is not likely a real call for liberation or protest in favor of reformation for the Middle Eastern women’s movement. It is a metaphor. Neshat’s work is a look at the post-revolution from her point of view. The West interprets the high drama of her work and sympathizes with her. She is the West’s credible witness and its emissary.
“Less than twenty years ago it was impossible to imagine a Shirin Neshat. Today, it is impossible to imagine her out of the visual repertoire of our world.” (Goldberg 43)
Works Cited
Goldberg, Roselee, Shirin Neshat, and Giorgio Verzotti. Shirin Neshat. Milan: Charta, 2002.
Heartney, Eleanor, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott. After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. Fort Worth: Prestel Publishing, 2007.
Ravenal, John, “Shirin Neshat: Double Vision” in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, pp. 447-458.
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