I Will Greet the Sun Again, a retrospective of the work of Shirin Neshat, was exhibited at The Broad in Los Angeles. The book of that exhibition has recently been published and it covers Neshat’s work in photography, as well as film and video, from the early 1990s to the present. As a teenager, Neshat left Iran in the mid1970s to study in the US and her work as a visual artist gets under way in the years that followed return trips to her home country in the early 1990s. Iran’s cultural heritage and the social changes wrought by the Iranian Revolution, after the overthrow of the country’s last shah and the establishment of an Islamic republic, write themselves (sometimes literally) into her work.
In Bonding (1995), two pairs of hands are choreographed: the larger pair are Neshat’s and in them rest the hands of her five-year-old child. Inscriptions, using designs from time-honoured Islamic art, Arabic script and the tradition of tattooing, cover the adult’s hands. The photograph itself is taken by someone else – such collaboration is characteristic of Neshat’s work – but the transmission of cultural identity is realised in her own distinctive way. The flesh of the child’s hands is unmarked, a tabula rasa that allows for personal expression of its own kind. The sheer blackness that surrounds the image could be indexing the hijab, a compulsory item of dress for Iranian women, or the chador; indicative of the force for social conditioning. (What black and white photography cannot show is the vivid and stylish colouring that women in Iran choose for their hijabs as a way of countering the male mandate.)
In Untitled (1996), two fingers of an upraised hand rest on a woman’s lips while the face above them has been cropped out of the picture. A gesture of silencing, perhaps, but also evoking the non-Western sign of protection, the hamsa. The writing on the hand is from a poem by Forough Farrokhzad, the iconoclastic Iranian female poet.
Representations of femininity in an Islamic society are central to Neshat’s photography, polemically so in her early Women of Allah series that imbricates womanhood and violence. Weapons are depicted alongside female bodies and, in the arresting Offered Eyes (1993), cursive writing orbits an inscrutable eye that takes on the form of a solar system around a black sun. Make of that what you wish.
Neshat’s photography (some in colour), after her turn to video and film following Women of Allah, is best appreciated in still images from the moving pictures of projects like Passage (2001) and Tooba (2002). Her ongoing concern with issues of culture, identity and belonging reveals itself in The Home of My Eyes (2015), a series of portraits featuring ordinary Azerbaijanis (citizens of a country that was part of Iran until 1813).
Neshat’s work across different visual media reveals an auteur who, like the film director Jacques Tourneur in this respect, uses expressionistic lighting and a palette of black and white to create a poeticism of darkness and solitariness embedded in social and political realities. The position and representation of women in society is a constant in her considerable and impressive oeuvre.
I Will Greet the Sun Again by Shirin Neshat is published by Prestel
Sean Sheehan
