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Trajectory

Qazvin (Irán), 1957

At the age of seventeen, she left her native country to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1979 and went on to earn a Master in Fine Arts in 1981. While she was studying in the United States, Ayatola HomeiniÕs Islamic Revolution was taking place in her homeland, dramatically transforming Iranian society.

In 1990, she returned to her country and was impressed by the social, economic, political and cultural changes in Iran, especially regarding the situation of women, who had lost many of the rights they had won under the rule of the Persian monarchy and who, once again, were forced to wear the traditional veil. For the next three years, she travelled to Iran on numerous occasions and decided to abandon her activity as a gallery owner and devote herself entirely to creating art, which she uses as a means of exploring her identity as a woman, a Muslim and an exile. In 1993, she presented her first one person exhibition, a series of portraits entitled Unveiling, in which Islamic women, including herself, pose with the traditional Muslim chador. In these black-and-white photographs, the subjectsÕ eyes, hands and feet alone are uncovered and Neshat covers these with texts in Persian calligraphy reproducing poems about love and desire by Iranian women writers, as well as religious dicta that address the position of women in Islamic faith.

That same year, she began to introduce weapons into her representations of veiled women. She entitled this new project Women of Allah. With these images, she subverted the masculine stereotype of the Islamic martyr and made manifest the violence exercised against women in these communities, while also questioning the inevitable ties between politics and religion, terrorism and fundamentalism, ire and devotion.

In 1997, she became interested in film, with which she had experimented previously. Her first film was Turbulent, a projection on two screens facing each other and thus submerging spectators in the narration; a format that was to characterise her two subsequent films, Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000). In this trilogy, she examined the gender relations in Islamic societies. The same year she produced Rapture, she filmed Soliloquy in Turkey and Albany.

This film is a reflection on the feeling of dislocation and the sensation of loss that she herself has experimented as an exile and in which she proposes a dialogue between tradition and modernity, between East and West. Her latest tapes, presented in 2002, deal with universal issues that do not admit geographic location. Passage, produced in collaboration with the musician Philip Glass, embodies her first experience with colour cinema and in it she explores the theme of death from a poetic viewpoint. In Possessed, a crazy woman divested of her veil, an alter ego of the artist, confronts a crowd that discovers newfound feelings in her presence. Pulse introduces the motif of love. In this video, the spectator becomes an intruder who spies on a woman in the intimacy of her rooms listening to a song about desire on the radio. S. R.