Ocula : Shirin Neshat, The Fury, Dirimart.

Exhibition View: Shirin Neshat, The Fury, Dirimart Pera, Istanbul (14 March–7 April 2024). Courtesy Dirimart, Istanbul. 

Shirin Neshat's photographs and video installations explore the cultural issues of her native country Iran with a particular emphasis on the experience of women. Growing up in a westernized, upper middle-class family in Iran, Neshat left Iran to study art in Los Angeles in 1974, just before the Iran Islamic Revolution; she did not return until 1990. She began making art about the collision of western and eastern ideologies, which had profoundly impacted her and her family's lives. Neshat's work examines the physical, emotional, and cultural implications of veiled women in Iran with written words taken from religious texts. Her subsequent video works departed dramatically from overtly political content or critique, in favor of more poetic imagery and narratives. Her work, which has never been shown in Iran, essentially declares the female presence in a male dominated culture. In her films and photographs, the female gaze becomes a powerful and dangerous instrument for communication. Neshat further explored cultural taboos through video and video installations. In 1999, Neshat won the 48th Venice Biennial prize for her film Turbulent, which contrasts a man singing in front of an all-male audience, with a woman singing to an empty concert hall.

Shirin Neshat ( b. 1957 Qazvin) lives and works in New York. Since 2000 Neshat has also participated in film festivals, including the Telluride Film Festival (2000), Chicago International Film Festival (2001), San Francisco International Film Festival (2001), Locarno International Film Festival (2002), Tribeca Film Festival (2003), Sundance Film Festival (2003), and Cannes Film Festival (2008). Among the many awards Neshat has won are the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale (1999), the Grand Prix at the Kwangju Biennale (2000), the Visual Art Award from the Edinburgh International Film Festival (2000), the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York (2002), the ZeroOne Award from the Universität der Künste Berlin (2003), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize from the Hiroshima City Museum of Art (2005), and the Lillian Gish Prize in New York (2006).

Neshat has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1998), the Art Institute of Chicago (1999), Dallas Museum of Art (2000), Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna (2000), National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (2001), Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2002), Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum Für Gengewart in Berlin (2005), Stedelijk Museum (2006), and National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjevik (2008). She has also participated in the Venice Biennale (1995 and 1999), Austrian Triennial on Photography in Graz (1996), Biennale of Sydney (1996 and 2000), Johannesburg Biennale (1997), Istanbul Biennial (1998), Carnegie International (1999), Whitney Biennial (2000), Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2002), Documenta 11 (2002), ICP Triennial of Photography and Video at the International Center of Photography in New York (2003), and Lights Camera Action at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2007).

Text courtesy Dirimart.

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