SHIRIN NESHAT

A multidisciplinary artist, Shirin Neshat (1957, Qazvin) works with photography, video, film and theatre, creating highly lyrical narratives and politically loaded visions that question the themes of power, religion, race and the relationship between past and present, east and west, individual and collective.

The volume, on the occasion of the first major solo exhibition in Italy dedicated to Neshat at PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, spans the artist’s more than 30-year career, with almost 200 photographs and ten video installations, collected by the world’s most important museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, the Guggenheim, New York and Tate Modern.

Neshat interprets the history and present of her birth country, Iran, and indeed the whole world from the female perspective: from her debut in the 1990s with the Women of Allah series, comprising photographs of women whose bodies are inscribed with poetic calligraphy, to The Fury, a video installation that anticipates the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

Neshat’s work, however, goes beyond the theme of gender and uses male/female dualism as a starting point for exploring the tension between belonging and exile, sanity and insanity, dream and reality.

Text in English and Italian.