The work of Iranian-born American artist Shirin Neshat (born 1957) is within that highly select category of art that strives to penetrate the essence of Islamic religion and translate it into the universal language of art. Although she did not begin creating until the age of thirty, Neshat is currently considered one of the most important contemporary artists in the world. Her highly intimate, autobiographical video works have been shown at some of the world's most prestigious exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International, the Whitney Biennale, the Sydney Biennale, the Lyon Biennale, and the Biennale in Kwangju.

Her films are only minutes long and often filmed in black and white. In them the artist focuses on the situation of women in contemporary Islamic societies. In exploring the political, psychological, sociological, and cultural aspects of this situation, in an unusual manner she transfers the discussion onto the philosophical and poetic plane. Neshat explores the oppositions inherent in this situation - nature-culture, male-female, public-private - and in doing so has developed her own filmic language, a language that she uses much like a visual artist, combining spare, often graphic-like images with music and text taking the form of fragments of Persian poetry painted on the bodies of her actors. The female figure adorned in a black chador and Farsi text has become emblematic of her work, which has for many years engaged in a creative dialogue with contemporary Iranian cinema. Ameh Wallach writes: "Shirin Neshat's approach is simple, poetic, minimalist, and is appropriately communicative. It allows for criticism of Islamic society without overtly declaring that stance. One could say that the artist, in discovering a mode of representation that develops within a limited space, simultaneously owes the conciseness and universality of her work to this limitation.".

Neshat's visit to Iran in 1990, eleven years after the revolution of the Ayatollah Rudollach Khomeini, became the source for her breakthrough works. The cultural changes she observed, deriving from the transformation of the former Persia into the Islamic Republic of Iran, moved Neshat deeply. From this moment on the thematic focus of her work shifted to issues of stereotypes and borders and attempts at transcending these, social and cultural conventions that limit the uniqueness of individuals, particularly women, issues of identity, freedom, and exile. As the artist herself says: "I would call my work a visual discourse on feminism and contemporary Islam. In it I strive to analyze certain facts and myths, proving that they are much more complex than they initially seem. I am more someone who poses questions. I prefer to ask them than to answer them, and that is what my work consists of." Ameh Wallach adds: "The analysis that Neshat achieves by creating images of the heart, mind, and soul of Islam has more and more in common with the gut intelligence with which Frida Kahlo went about studying her own culture. She successfully combines specific subjects with epic means of expression, engaging in an alchemy of image, location, event, and music.".

The exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle will consist of 2 of the artist's earlier works from her narrative series - RAPTURE (1999) and TURBULENT (1998), that latter of which won the artist the Grand Prix at the 1999 Venice Biennale (the third part of the trilogy is Fervor, 2000) - and 2 of the artist's newest films - POSSESSED and PULSE, both dating from 2001.

RAPTURE is told on two-screens, mounted on opposite walls of the same space. It is the story of two groups, one of men, the other of women. The groups symbolize, respectively, the world of culture, social principles, tradition, space as a means of control (the fortress) on one hand, and wild, uncontrollable nature (the desert) on the other. It is set to the music of well-known Iranian artist Susan Deyhim, which combines elements of Middle Eastern and North African folk music and world music with text and the sounds of the surrounding world. The work grew out of a novel by Monir Ravani'pur titled "Ahl - i - gharq" (which can be translated as "Courageous Enough to Drown"), and a symbolic depiction of the weakness of the patriarchal social order.

In this film it is initially the men, dressed in shirts and trousers, who play in and explore their new surroundings while the women remain passive. The roles are then reversed: the women in their chadors take the risk of venturing beyond the space around the fortress and set out to see in a small boat. Poetic and hypnotizing, "Rapture" allows for a multitude of interpretations. It is at once a penetration of established gender stereotypes and a depiction of a dramatic, perhaps suicidal, attempt at breaking out of the established order. The scene of the boat launching echoes both images of biblical flight and the dramatic attempts at escape made by refugees throughout the world today. The refugees in this case, however, are women who flee not for political reasons, but for purely cultural ones.

TURBULENT, another component of the artist's narrative trilogy, was the first work to be made by Neshat in collaboration with an Iranian team which would participate in all of her future projects. The group includes composer and singer Susan Deyhim, cinematographer Ghasem Ebrahimian, and co-writer and sometime actor Shoja Youssefi Azari. The film is a musical duel played out on two screens. Azari plays a singer who performs a love song with the lyrics of the great thirteenth century mystic Rumi; Deyhim on the other hand performs her own eclectic compositions. Viewers observe the confrontation as it progresses, standing between the two screens. The man sings for a numerous audience, the woman, on the other hand, to an empty room. The duel is uneven with the throaty improvisations of Deyhim eclipsing the traditional song. As the artist said in one of her interviews: "The film is inspired by the fact that women in Iran are not allowed to perform or record music. If music is the expression of mystical and spiritual experience, it would be interesting to know why men are allowed this experience and women are not. What is a woman who has a mystical experience supposed to do...? The woman in 'Turbulence' breaks all rules. Firstly, she appears in a theatre, where she is simply not supposed to be. Secondly, her singing breaks all the norms of classical music. It is not intrinsically linked to language. She improvises. So what we have here is a set of oppositions... but we also talk about how women achieve a certain kind of freedom, how they become combative and unpredictable in this society, while men continue to live conventional lives."

Other works on view at the CCA are POSSESSED and PULSE. The heroine of POSSESSED is a thirty-year old woman portrayed by exceptional actress Shohreh Aghdashloo. She does not wear a chador but is dressed in a normal gown. Her story is one of helplessness in the face of aggression and solitude, which become the sources for her madness and banishment. Once again, in the background we hear the music of Susan Deyhim.

PULSE focuses on issues of gender relations and the relationship between Medieval and contemporary Islam, and seems to reference TURBULENT. This mysterious, metaphysical film depicts a woman, also played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, singing along with the radio, which plays a love song set to the words of the thirteenth century mystic Rumi. Most important here, however, is the atmosphere generated by the music and the intimate, romantic interior, combining to create an almost Gothic feel.

The exhibition was open on May 27, 2002 at 6:00 p.m.

Photo courtesy of Barbara Gladstone Gallery.

Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle
(Centrum Sztuki Wspolczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski)
Al. Ujazdowskie 6, 00-461 Warsaw
tel. (+48 22) 628 12 71-73
fax (+48 22) 628 95 50
csw.art.pl

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