Shirin Neshat

Born, 1957 in Kaswin/Qazvin, Iran

From the archived Documenta 11 website : www.documenta12.de//archiv/d11/data/english/index.html

“With provocative ambivalence, Shirin Neshat combines feminism and contemporary Islam in pictorial discourses rich in associations. Her handling of Iranian Islam in particular refers to the social, cultural, and religious coding of above all female bodies and the gender-specific division of public and private space. The artist occupies the mutual contingency of cultural identities with metaphors that poetically describe a personal dialogue between cultures. Since 1996, Neshat has produced videos and films influenced by post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. The reduced, allegorical plots are entirely without dialogue and develop from a thematically and formally dualistic, contending narration. The allegorical productions achieve an almost monumental character through the interaction of editing rhythm and sound direction of the moving film music. More recent works use a similar film language viewing binary opposites within Islamic tradition and philosophy as a continuum.”

Along with Yinka Shonibare MBE and Yang Fudong, and Christodoulos Panayiotou, the Iran-born artist Shirin Neshat exhibited in I Know Something About Love, a 2011 exhibition held at Parasol unit, London.

The exhibition’s press release included the following extracts:

“This exhibition at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art was devoted to works by Yang Fudong, Shirin Neshat, Christodoulos Panayiotou and Yinka Shonibare MBE. Each of these artists explores the theme of love in different times and cultures through the spectrum of their personal experience, observation and commentary. The exhibition title takes its cue from a 1960s song written by Bert Berns and performed by The Exciters, in which there is the recurring lyric, ‘I know something about love’.
 
Shirin Neshat examined the theme of love through the lenses of gender, as probably established and enforced since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. In her two-channel video work, ‘Fervor, 2000’, Iranian artist Neshat seems not only to highlight the frustration and helplessness of Iranian women in this new paradigm, but also to demonstrate how the negative view of love within the revolutionary culture affects natural human feelings.
 
This exhibition was curated by Ziba Ardalan and is accompanied by a new publication, co-published and distributed internationally by Koenig Books.”

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