Research Paper Shirin Neshat
In 1 979, the Islamic Revolution would prevent her from returning to her country of origin for twenty years. She attended the University of California and received a BAA, then moved to New York, where she began working at the Storefront for art and Architecture. Even though Unseat had studied art in college, arriving in New York commenced a break from art- making until 1 993, when she went back to Iran. The past 15 years, Unseat has created provocative expressions drawn on her personal experiences, and the widening political and ideological rift teen the West and Middle East.
She’s the most famous contemporary artist to emerge from Iran. Her frequent visits to Iran after the revolution led to the creation of a body of work which rocketed Nest’s artistic career. Due to the controversial nature Of her art, Unseat has not been able to return to her country since 1996. Tensor 2 Nest’s most famous work of art was Women of Allah (1993-1997), which is a series of photographs depicting women in veils carrying guns with their skin covered in Islamic poetry.
These images emulated her sense of how the evolution had changed, especially affecting the lives of women seeking freedom, rebelling in martyrdom and militancy, and also how it had changed the Iran that she once knew. Unseat began experimenting with film and video installations in 1 998, when she met Iranian artist/filmmaker, Shoji Izard. They commenced a collaboration which has led to numerous important video pieces, such as the trilogy; Turbulent (1 998), Rapture (1 999), and Fervor (2000), about gender roles in the restrictive Islamic society. In Turbulent, there are two screens that you stand between.
One features a man singing a classical poem before an adoring all-male audience. On the other, a woman on an empty stage sings a wild, guttural and language-less song. It leaves the men on the other screen completely shocked. She explains. “… This is indicative Of how I feel about women in Iran. In the way that they are so far against the wall, but they are far more resilient and protesting and they’re much more of a fighter than the men because they have much more at stake. ” Rapture, is an installation of two synchronized black-and -?white video sequences that are projected on opposite walls; large in scale, they evoke cinema screens.
Working with hours of footage and a team of editors, the artist constructed two parallel narratives. The piece begins with images of a stone fortress and a hostile desert. The fortress dissolves into a shot of over one hundred men, uniformly dressed in plain white shirts and black pants, walking quickly through the cobblestone streets of an old city and entering the gates of the fortress. Together, the desert scene dissolves into a shot of n equal number of women, wearing flowing, full-length veils, or shadows, emerging from different points in the barren landscape.
Unseat self- consciously exploits Tensor 3 entrenched cliches about gender and space. She mostly focused on the theme with a story about women moving across the desert, and how a few break free to leave on a small boat. Soliloquy (1999), however, portrays a woman torn between two forms of life. Modern and traditional, and Western and Middle Eastern, visually revealing the split between two very different cultures that are both a big part of her life. Soliloquy is a double-screen color video projection produced in an edition of six plus one artist’s proof.
