Shirin Neshat: «Women must ask themselves what position they want to have in the future»

«NI don’t believe that artists should be activists, but I’m sure that artists are required to participate in the collective conversation about what’s happening in the world.” The world, or rather the worlds, of Shirin Neshat, one of the most awarded and influential artistswhich over time has alternated photography, video, cinema and direction of operas, is in constant movement.

Shirin Neshat, her voice from Iran to America

Born in Qazvin, Iran, she studied in the United States. You are in America in 1979, the year of the Islamic revolution. She returns home, but encouraged by her father (“a cultured and progressive man – a doctor with a passion for agriculture – to be an individual to take risks, to learn, to see the world, as he had always done” ) leaves a second time. To never return.

In the mid-1990s, Shirin Neshat created her first work, Women of Allahseries of self-portraits and portraits of women, associated with three primary symbols, the chador, the gun and the Farsi poems transcribed on the faces, hands and feet. A work which, if it represented the artist’s entry into the world, sealed the doors of the motherland forever.

Today this cosmopolitan woman with the sweetest voice and dark eyes, who has chosen exile, while continuing to nourish her work with the whites and blacks of her land and with the verses she has inherited, does not stop looking at the world, as convinced as ‘is that «the worst art is that which tells the public what to think. I have never been interested in suggesting what is right and what is wrong.”

At a time when major cultural institutions are turning their gaze to the women of Iran – the Nobel Peace Prize for activist Narges Mohammadi is confirmation of this – this artist who, in 2009, he won a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival with a first work, Women without men, again in Venice this year received “The streets of the image. The prize for the visual arts”, new recognition awarded by Cinematografo, Giornate degli Autori and NABA, New Academy of Fine Arts.

Shirin Neshat in Until we are free

And the Santa Giulia museum in Brescia has included one of his works in the show Until we are freewhich takes its title from the book by Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi.

His work is personal but perhaps not entirely autobiographical. The encounters she has had, the bodies of women, the life divided between a now unattainable motherland and the America that welcomed her and where she has now spent more time than in Iran where she was born, have led her to finally ask herself which world does it belong to?
I’m Iranian, but I’m also a nomad. I am happy when those who look at my works see me as a person who has crossed borders. I’m happy when I’m not reduced to a stereotype.

Is the intersection between different arts and between East and West a comfortable place for you?
Sometimes I ask myself which art I love most and sometimes I answer that it is opera (he staged an Aida directed by Muti in 2017 and for the Salzburg festival in 2022, ed. ), but what matters to me is always the creation of a single image that says everything, by any means.

What image says it all about the women’s revolution in Iran?
We have seen many images of Woman, life, freedom: they depicted women in the streets, on the roofs of cars, burning the veil, all very powerful. They are documents, they convey information and they are important, unforgettable. And even though I don’t work in relation to the news, the news certainly passes through me and changes me.

She works above all on bodies, women’s bodies, which in her work are often seen as battlefields. After Women of Allah there was the Fervor installation, which showcased gender segregation, and then Munis and Faezah on the sexual abuse suffered by women in Iranian prisons…
Incarcerated women who often commit suicide. In my work I have tried to explain how men exercise their ideas on the female body, how the body becomes the site of male rhetoric.

And it extended the issue to its second home when the abolition of the supreme court ruling “Roe v. Wade” reduced the ability of American women to terminate pregnancies.
With Land of Dreams (2019-2021), for the first time I asked myself what the people of the United States, which is now my home, dream about. And right now I see a tragic parallel between America and Iran in the rise of religious fanaticism, violence, corruption, oppression, brainwashing. Trump is no different from Khamenei, two political figures who have become ideological sources. No matter how many wrong things he does, people believe in Donald Trump more every day. And Khamenei, corrupt and violent as he is, has more and more power. For me, America is the land of unfulfilled dreams and American politics represents the fall of all illusions. In Iran it is the same, there is no alternative to the incumbent power. But while America is going backwards on women’s rights, Iran is hosting the first women’s revolution in history. Iranian women paid a very high price under the regime and now their anger has been unleashed. I hope that Americans find the same anger within themselves.

The fight against patriarchy, which began in Hollywood with the #MeToo movement, however, has led us towards Barbie…
The results are contradictory. I believe that women need to ask themselves what position they want to occupy in the future and what cultural products will help them move forward. I haven’t seen Barbie, but I have seen Priscilla (Sofia Coppola’s latest film, presented in Venice in competition and released in cinemas in February, ed.), it is yet another film in which the woman presents herself as a victim and one can just have pity on her. But perhaps it is too early to have definitive answers regarding this ongoing change…

From Women of Allah onwards, he made the poetic word the protagonist together with the images. She made us discover the magnificent verses of Farough Farrouzzagh, a true revolutionary (the collection of all her poems, I speak from the confines of the night, of the poet and documentary maker has just been published by Bompiani).
And so modern! What you write about is not just about Islam and Iranian culture, it is universal. I find that few Iranian authors, in cinema or literature, have managed to transcend political discourse, the story of oppression, of violence, to arrive at saying universal words. Abbas Kiarostami did. And also Farough Farrouzzagh. For us Iranians, literature is crucial. We don’t have a history of visual art, but we do have a history of poetry that goes back to ancient times. Since I was little, Farrouzzagh’s verses have been important to me. He was extremely radical in talking about sexuality and religion, going against tradition. His voice was authentically feminist and he was also radical in his lifestyle. He died in 1967 in a car accident, aged 32. I idolize her for how she has been true to herself and how she has lit my path. I live in the West and aspire to communicate with everyone, to create an artistic language that transcends borders. Her verses help me do that. I think I can say that I might not have become an artist if it weren’t for her words. She wrote a poem called Dar Barabar-e-Khoda, “Face to Face with God”, in which she confronted God with her own desires and spoke about the female body as no one had ever done before her.

There are still his verses in his latest project, The Fury, which was shown in New York in early 2023 (and now continues in Stockholm), and which is about madness.
I followed the emotional journey of an Iranian woman who immigrated to the USA who, although free to move, lives traumatized by the memory of the violence she suffered in prison in Iran. She is an artist, a dancer, only the music she listens to obsessively in her room keeps you anchored to reality. As for me, art was a savior for her too, living in my imagination created a safe place for me, if they took it away from me I would die.

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