Shirin Neshat: About

Bio

Shirin Neshat (Iranian, b. 1957) is an artist and filmmaker who works in photography, video installation and feature film. Her photographs often carry handwritten Persian text, and her work returns to gender roles and to life in exile.^,^, She was born in Qazvin, Iran, and is based in New York City.

Neshat left Iran at 17 to study in the United States. She returned in 1990 after sixteen years away. That visit informed her first major body of work, the photographic series Women of Allah, 1993–97.

In 1999 her two-channel film Turbulent, 1998, won the international prize at the Venice Biennale. It comments on the inequality of gender roles in Middle Eastern culture. In Rapture, 1999, the men are projected on one gallery wall and the women on the other. A viewer therefore cannot follow one scene without turning their back on the other. Her feature film Women Without Men, 2009, adapts Shahrnush Parsipur's novel and won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. She later directed Looking for Oum Kulthum, 2017, and Land of Dreams, 2021. Her film Roja, 2016, uses an alter ego to conjure surreal visions of the fear of the other and the desire to reattach to one's homeland.

In the 2012 photographic series The Book of Kings, she inscribed text from the Shahnameh directly onto portraits of friends and acquaintances. A survey of her work opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2015, co-curated by Melissa Chiu.^, That year she also made The Home of My Eyes for the opening of the Yarat Contemporary Art Centre in Baku. It comprises 55 monochrome portraits of Azeri people, each overlaid with Persian poetry and the sitter's own answers to four questions.