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Shirin Neshat, from Women Without Men, 2008

ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum
Aros Allé 2
+45 8730 6
Århus
Shirin Neshat –
Women Without Men
March 1-May 25, 2008

This is the world premiere of the major video work Women without Men by internationally renowned Iranian-American video artist Shirin Neshat. The work consists of five large video installations — Makdokht, Zarin, Faizeh, Munis and Farokh Legha, which can be experienced in five specially arranged gallery installations. The installation Women without Men lasts for 1 hour 15 minutes.

The artist has taken her inspiration for Women without Men from a novel from 1989 bearing the same title by the Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur. The action of this novel is set in 1953 — an important year in the recent history of Iran. For it was the year in which democratic forces headed by the prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh were brought down in a coup led by American and British forces. The coup reinstalled the Shah as an absolute ruler.

The book follows five women from various social strata in Teheran who — with the political and military unrest and chaos as its backcloth — are brought together by various circuitous paths in a garden in the town of Karaj. There is the unmarried teacher Mahdokht, the young prostitute Zarin, the two unmarried friends Faizeh and Munis, and finally the no longer young woman of the middle classes, Farrokhlaqa. All the stories centre on the question of sexuality or the lack of it, ignorance of it and fear of it, on taboos and suppression. They are about how the control of female sexuality by society and, on a more intimate level, by men and not least other women becomes an important parameter in the exercise of power.

The novel is written in the tradition of magical realism, and Shirin Neshat retains this surreal angle in her great epic drama of the lives of the five women.

Shirin Neshat was born in Iran in 1957. As the daughter of a western-oriented academic family, she was sent to study in the USA at the age of 17. She settled in San Francisco in California, where she finished her art studies with an MFA at Berkeley. Neshat meanwhile decided to remain in the USA rather than return to Iran, where in 1979 the Islamic revolution under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini had introduced the Islamic clerical regime which still holds power in that country today. So Shirin Neshat has lived in exile in New York for almost 30 years and only been able to visit Iran on quite a small number of occasions.

Neshat’s experiences of life in Iran — during her first visit to the country after the revolution — came to exercise a crucial influence on her life and art. The dreadful experience of how women had lost all civil rights and been compelled to wear the chador outside the home inspired her to the series of photographs entitled Women of Allah (1993-97). These works denote Shirin Neshat’s artistic debut. They are complex images filled with contrasts in which the artist dressed in the chador and with hand-written text fragments on the visible parts of her body, focuses on compulsion, power, life and death, martyrdom, love and sexuality.

Since 1996, Neshat has concentrated her artistic activities on video and film, and her first appearance on the international art scene caused a sensation when her video work Turbulent was awarded the Golden Lion in the Venice Biennale in 1999. This work is her first with dual projections of parallel films, in which by being seated in the dark area between the two screens the public is drawn in as co-participators in the drama on the screens.

Several of Neshat’s later works — like Turbulent — focus on the position of the sexes within the framework of an Islamic social structure. The contrast between woman and man and woman and society is taken further in contrasts such as black / white, nature / culture, rebellion / acquiescence, powerlessness / power, guilt / love.

In the video work Soliloquy from 1999, she focuses on another theme, that is to say the conditions imposed by exile. It is a very personal work about the existential consequences arising from exile. But at the same time it is a grand drama about one of the greatest challenges of our age.

Shirin Neshat starts out in her art from her own Islamic cultural background, but the themes and values on which she focuses are universal, and so her works appeal to and inspire a large public throughout the world.

Shirin Neshat, from Women Without Men, 2008.

Shirin Neshat, from Women Without Men, 2008.

Shirin Neshat, from Women Without Men, 2008.

Shirin Neshat, from Women Without Men, 2008.

Shirin Neshat, from Women Without Men, 2008.