Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian photographer and visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. ¹ Her artwork centres on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity. ¹ She was brought up in a Muslim family; no source read for this record names a school or path for her herself, and her data records her faith as unknown, with the evidence stated there. ¹

She was born on 26 March 1957 in Qazvin, the fourth of five children of wealthy parents, brought up in that religious city in a warm, supportive Muslim family environment, where she learned traditional religious values through her maternal grandparents; her father was a physician and her mother a homemaker. ¹ She was enrolled for a time in a Catholic boarding school in Tehran. ¹ In 1975 she left Iran to study art at the University of California, Berkeley, completing her BA, MA and MFA there, and graduated in 1983 before moving to New York. ¹

In New York she worked for some ten years with the Storefront for Art and Architecture, which her future husband ran, and made practically no art she kept. ¹ In 1990 she returned to Iran, a year after Ayatollah Khomeini's death, and found the difference between the culture she remembered and the one she witnessed enormous — most noticeably in people's physical appearance and public behaviour. ¹ That shock began her mature work. ¹

Her earliest mature works were the photographic series Unveiling (1993) and Women of Allah (1993-97), portraits of women entirely overlaid with Persian calligraphy, exploring femininity in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy in her home country. ¹ She then turned to film, influenced by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, making two-screen installations — Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Soliloquy (1999) — that set coordinated films in stark contrast: light and dark, black and white, male and female. ¹ In 1999 she won the International Award of the XLVIII Venice Biennale with Turbulent and Rapture. ¹

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, a film examining the 1953 coup that supplanted Iran's elected government. ¹ She followed it with Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017) and Land of Dreams (2021), both co-directed with Shoja Azari, and the two-channel installation The Fury (2022). ¹ In July 2009 she joined a three-day hunger strike at the United Nations in protest at the 2009 Iranian presidential election, and in 2022 she showed Woman Life Freedom in support of the protests over the death of Mahsa Amini. ¹ She has said that since the Islamic Revolution she has gravitated toward art concerned with tyranny, dictatorship, oppression and political injustice: "Although I don't consider myself an activist, I believe my art — regardless of its nature — is an expression of protest, a cry for humanity." ¹

Her first solo exhibition was at Franklin Furnace in New York in 1993; a major retrospective opened at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2013, and The Broad in Los Angeles presented the thirty-year retrospective I Will Greet the Sun Again in 2019. ¹ She received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 2006, was named Artist of the Decade by a HuffPost critic in 2010, and received the Praemium Imperiale in 2017. ¹ In 2017 she directed Verdi's Aida at the Salzburg Festival. ¹

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