"Do U Dare!" explores exile, loneliness and the distance between being watched and being understood

The artist is bringing her brooding anti-war production of Verdi to Barcelona’s Liceu, with Russian soprano Anna Netrebko in the title role

Decades into her career, the artist is still evolving—and exploring what it means to be Iranian.

As her adopted country wages war against the nation of her birth, Shirin Neshat argues that art should complicate political narratives rather than reinforce them. She reflects on exile, identity, war and the enduring value of ambiguity

For her show at the Palazzo Marin, the artist found inspiration in the story of fellow Iranian Nasim Aghdam, whose dispute with YouTube escalated into violence

Political, poetic, and totally screenshot-worthy: why Shirin Neshat’s black?and?white worlds are suddenly everywhere again.

Calligraphy on faces, politics in every gaze: here’s why Shirin Neshat is the quiet powerhouse turning black and white portraits into art hype, big money, and must see museum moments.

The regional context remains essential to contemporary Islamic art. Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat, widely exhibited throughout the Middle East and internationally, examines themes of faith, power, and gender through photography and film.

Neshat’s art transcends borders. It resonates emotionally and intellectually with viewers regardless of religion, gender or ethnicity. Her work has been featured in a retrospective at The Broad in Los Angeles, and has earned numerous accolades, including the International Prize at the Venice Biennale and the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival for her political drama Women Without Men (2009). This month, she adds yet another title to her list of accomplishments – creative director of Aida for the Paris Opera – a role that promises to merge her distinct visual world with the grandeur and history of one of Europe’s most storied cultural institutions.

From March 28 to June 8, 2025, the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea (PAC) in Milan will host Body of Evidence, the most extensive retrospective ever dedicated in Italy to Iranian artist Shirin Neshat. Her poetic vision delves into the duality of oppression and self-determination, memory and oblivion, and silence and protest. The biggest mistake one can make when visiting a Neshat exhibition is to assume that the artist speaks only about herself—as a woman, an Iranian, and a self-exiled American artist.

‘Shirin Neshat: Born of Fire,” the internationally renowned Iranian-born artist’s first solo museum show in the New York area in 20 years and the first ever on the East End, will open Sunday at the Parrish Art Museum. Neshat has spent her career examining what it means to exist between two cultures. “Born of Fire” consists of specific bodies of work from four different time periods. The first, the photographic piece “Women of Allah” (1993-1997), was created after Ms. Neshat returned to Iran in 1990, her first time there since 1974, when she left to study art in Los Angeles.

To move a heavy black curtain to witness the story of separation. This is the gesture by which one becomes a spectator of Body of evidence, the exhibition on Shirin Neshat (Iranian, now settled in New York) at the PAC in Milan, which invites us to spy from behind a material and metaphorical curtain that acts as a boundary between the real of the Milanese streets and the surrealistic setting of the works on display, narrating the Iranian culture of division.