Iranian Contemporary Artist Speaks of exile, Diaspora, and Displacement

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat started her artmaking in 1993, and her first exhibition was a set of photos called Women of Allah which proposed the issues of Neshat’s displacement within Islamic ideology and art. Born in 1957, Iran, she is one of the well-known, American-based contemporary artists of today, who has gone beyond to explore the issues of exile, diaspora, belonging, and displacement. In her series of photos, Neshat present the militant Muslim women that subvert the stereotype and examines the Islamic idea of martyrdom. All photographs are in black and white and in most of her photographs, she is including the Farsi or Arabic text on faces or hands, chador (which is the women cover), and showing gun in few of them.

Few years later, Neshat began working on video and sound installations which result Rapture in 1999, which was influenced by her Fervor. These two works including her earlier work called Turbulent has composed a “trilogy on human identity, inflected by differences in gender and culture, which situates the work at the heart of art world preoccupations today.”

Shirin Neshat, Rapture, 1999, video still. Images courtesy of the artist and Barbara Gladstone Gallery.

Rapture is a twelve minute poetic video in black and white which focuses on the differentiation of gender role both visually and spatially and addresses to the traditional and cultural aspect of patriarchy and fundamentalist society of Iran. After visiting Iran, Neshat started analyzing the differences between the western and eastern cultures and this emphasis has made a great impact on all of her artworks. Neshat’s powerful art is characterized by a visual lyricism and elegant beauty that is always captivating and occasionally confusing.

In today globalized world, artists such as Shirin Neshat play a significant role to represent the differences between the cultures of her homeland and home she currently lives in. As an Iranian, I feel privileged to look at Neshat’s work and compare and contrast my personal experiences through the different worlds. Also the foreign viewers, who never had experienced the Islamic country such as Iran, will definitely enjoy and get a sense of the way Neshat has illustrated her works through her own view.

By Jaleh Fotoohi

Check these two PBS interviews with Charlie Rose:  January 2002 and June 2006

Related Reviews: Global Art Database,Visual Art,Photography,Video

The babel jungle

Walt Disney was a firm believer in utopias.  In all of his animated movies he strived to create lands that were full of harmony, acceptance and love.  One classic example is The Jungle Book (1967), a movie about a boy who is raised by wolves.  Both he and all the animals can talk to one another and more or less get along.  But what’s more significant than the utopian plots of Disney movies is their attempt at reaching global audiences.  Among many other movies, The Jungle Book was translated into twenty-four languages and distributed across the world. 

Thirty-five years after this movie was released, Pierre Bismuth (a French contemporary artist) decided to investigate Disney’s so-called ‘universality’ further.  Bismuth examined every translation of The Jungle Book and decided which character would best fit with each language.  For example, he decided that the patrolling elephants would speak German.  Except for the elephant general’s wife who would speak French, alluding to when France and Germany worked together in WWII.  He also purposely put Latin languages next to Semite languages in reference to issues in Palestine. 

In this video-installation for Manifesta 4 entitled The Jungle Book Project (2002, video on plasma screen), Bismuth transformed this childhood tale into a tower of Babel.  When God made everyone speak a different language, they could no longer understand one another enough to finish building their tower to heaven.  And when Bismuth made each of the nineteen characters speak nineteen different languages, he achieved a similar effect.  Nobody can understand one another within the movie, nor can those watching.  Both the viewer and the characters in the movie become isolated by which languages they speak.  “By mixing the languages in only one film,” says Bismuth in an interview, “you transform something that should be understandable by each of us into something that is incomprehensible to everybody.” 

Bismuth is pointing out that although we live in a globalized world, we are far from being in a utopia.  Movie companies like Disney may try and push their ideals onto other countries, but we are still divided and isolated by our languages and cultures. 

Kathryn Schmidt 

Related Reviews: Animation, Video, Global Art Database

Mike Relm – Visual Acoustics

Mike Relm is a video DJ who scratches both music and video simultaneously, and does so through a tactile medium:  The LP.  Hardware like “scratch live” and other VJ related software is making it possible to change the materiality of video to bring it closer towards its sensory kin.  Visual and acoustic methods/technology have usually coincided with one another, but their advancements for unification traditionally left the audio technology to supplement and sync to the medium of film or video. This method has only pronounced the linearity of the two mediums, stagnating its spatial, temporal layering abilities. By exchanging the roll of film or the tape of video for an audible technology such as the turntable, a tactile exploration of video can be had and retrace what audio has expanded for decades.

Riley Maruyama