Colecciones de arte

Whispers, 1997

DESCRIPTION

This photograph was exhibited in 1997 at the Marco Noire gallery in Turin, along with a group of photographs from the series that Neshat entitled Women of Allah, a series begun in 1993 and finished in 1997 when the artist took up film. Although she has not abandoned photography, film has become her principle media because it provides her with more resources for telling her stories than still images do and because she feels frustrated by the objectified and craft-like quality her photographs were taking on.

Whispers can be considered a transitional piece. Islamic women were the absolute protagonists of Neshat's earlier images and in this one, along with the profile of a veiled woman, she introduced the face of a man inscribed in Farsi, traditional Persian writing, anticipating the issue that would preoccupy her in her trilogy of double screen films; Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000): gender relations in the Islamic world. As in her films, the man and the woman are confronted, isolated from each other, without even looking at one another, without the possibility of communicating, with nothing left to them but the whisper referred to in the title. She has lost the words that he now possesses.

For Muslim women, language is one of the few realms of freedom. Feminist texts and texts about women are traditional in Arabian culture and women have used words, both written and spoken, as a means of protest and rebellion against male conformism and conservatism.

The women portrayed by Neshat -often including herself-, wearing the chadors typical in Islamic dress, acquire monumental qualities and far from becoming submissive victims, they appear strong and dignified. In these photographs, the artist does not appear to be taking a stand for or against the Islamic law forcing women to cover themselves in her country; Neshat prefers to pose questions to the spectator rather than to make statements; in fact, she turned to art in an attempt to resolve her own dilemmas about the changes she had seen in Iran after eleven years of voluntary exile, wondering about a country with which she discovered she is irreconcilable. As an exile, Neshat has ambiguous feelings about the chador: on the one hand, it is a symbol of oppression of women and male violence, and yet, on the other hand, it is a sign of identity, a symbol of resistance against disappearing traditions.

The use of black-and-white in her photographs is purposeful and not merely an aesthetically motivated choice, but one related to the perception she has of the transformations underway in her country; Iran abandoned the colour of Persian culture, which allowed heterogeneity, in order to adopt these two basic colours, which demand homogeneity. S. R.