On Wednesday, April 10, photographers, artists, business leaders, philanthropists, fans andfriends of the International Center of Photography (ICP) gathered at The Shed for a sold out event to celebrate five pioneering women for their creativity, leadership and contributions to photography as an art and a discipline. ICP’s 40th Annual Infinity Awards, sponsored by HEARST and Kering, honored Lynsey Addario, Renell Medrano, Shirin Neshat, Wendy Red Star, and Caryl S. Englander–the first time ICP’s Infinity Awards has awarded five women for their achievements. [...] During the event, each awardee was accompanied by a short film, telling the powerful and often personal story of their journey in photography.

Shirin Neshat's exhibition "The Fury" is on show at Dirimart (Istanbul) from March 14 to April 7, 2024. 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.

Award-winning artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat returns to Asia Society for the screening of Land of Dreams. Described by the filmmaker as one of her most personal works so far (Variety Magazine), the film follows Simin, an Iranian immigrant who works for the United States Census Bureau, on a journey to record citizens' dreams. The film was directed by Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari, and stars Sheila Vand, Matt Dillon, William Moseley, Isabella Rossellini, and Anna Gunn, among many others. The film will be shown on March 19 during Asia Week 2024, and will be followed by a discussion with the artist.

Throughout her artistic career, the renowned Iranian artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat has repeatedly explored the female body. Her work is a contested space in which themes such as sin, shame, violence, oppression, rebellion, power and protest play a role. "The Fury" (which will be presented at Fotografiska Berlin from 08/03/2024 to 09/06/2024) is a sophisticated combination of a dual-channel video installation and a series of black and white photographs with hand-lettered calligraphy of poems by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad. These nuanced works reflect Neshat's incisive artistic practice, which centres on the female body as both a battleground for ideology and a reservoir of power. Exploring the dynamics between the masculine and the feminine, the individual and the collective, these charged images grapple with issues of power in patriarchal societies.

Series two of the Frieze Master Podcasts brings you eight conversations between leading artists, writers, museum directors and curators that reflect the ethos of the Frieze Masters fair: looking at the past with a contemporary gaze. Including Shirin Neshat.

Powerful, political, and cinematic is "The Fury", the latest body of work by Shirin Neshat, displayed at the Goodman Gallery in London in the fall following its first showing in New York. Since the 1990s, the visual artist has captivated viewers through work that investigates gender and society, time and memory, the individual and the collective, and the complexities and contradictions of Islam, told through a personal and diasporic lens. Shot in June 2022 near Neshat’s Brooklyn studio, the conscious staging, the casting of local actors, and the music speak of its international charge, a cry against violence against women, on the absurdity of war, intolerance, and tyranny in its broader universal context.

“I never wanted to make political art,” said the artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat to the crowd at Performa’s Biennial. “My work is politically charged because of the life that I have lived and because many of my collaborators, most of us, are living in exile.” Since leaving Iran at seventeen, Neshat has been living in the U.S., making work that captures the experiences of women and children living under fundamentalist regimes. Her photographs, videos and sculptures meld abstraction and poeticism; the hallmark of her work is the Farsi script that often runs across her subject’s faces, where a veil might lay, which serves to “break the silence” imposed upon women.

There just aren’t that many Iranian women in the art world,” says Shirin Neshat, the 66-year-old artist whose work in photography and film over the past 30 years has attracted acclaim and controversy in equal measure. Talking with her friends, art adviser Nazy Nazhand and artist Sheree Hovsepian, she adds: “I think that the connection between the three of us is that we feel kind of rare in this community. We each play a role.” [...] Neshat challenges Iran’s oppression of women — her seminal Women of Allah series, created between 1993 and 1997, brought the issue to a global audience. Many of her black-and-white photographs, including close-ups of eyes or hands, are superimposed with handwritten text in Farsi, including words from the late Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, to signify strength in the face of oppression. Social media has the power to mobilise . . . It’s our duty to make some noise.

Shirin’s latest film, The Fury (2023), is a two-screen installation that retains the powerful black and white imagery used in her previous works. It’s a timely piece that coincides with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that started in Iran in September 2022, following Mahsa Amini’s death after being held in police custody. The women of Iran have been harassed, assaulted and, often, arrested and tortured for their fight for freedom; in The Fury, Shirin addresses this question of liberation through choreography and dance. The stark monochrome contrasts in cinematography emphasise the visual tension between the military personnel and the female protagonist; between the oppressive gaze of the state apparatus and the female body, which contains in itself both pain and power.

“The Fury” (presented at Goodman Gallery London from October 7 to November 4, 2023), is the latest body of work by the New York-based Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat, who, since the 1990s, has captivated viewers — and in some instances caused controversy — through an art that investigates gender and society, time and memory, the individual and the collective, and the complexities and contradictions of Islam, told through a personal and diasporic lens.

“I do not feel like a traditional artist, I have never been able to keep up with big events: I get bored quickly, I am afraid of repeating myself, I always feel the need to take on new challenges, even at the cost of failure. And in the end I always find my way.” Shirin Neshat is in Venice on the occasion of the Venice Film Festival to receive the film Life of Imagination. Visual Arts Award, a new recognition of cinema, Giornate degli Autori and NABA, an award from the New Academy of Fine Arts to those filmmakers who have distinguished themselves in other artistic practices of vision.