Shirin Neshat
01 Mar - 25 May 2008
SHIRIN NESHAT
"Women without Men"
The Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat’s monumental film opus, Women without Men, will be exhibited at ARoS. It is the world premiere of this major video cycle consisting of five video works.
Women without Men was created between 2004 and 2008. It consists of five video installations: Mahdokht, Zarin, Munis, Faezeh and Farokh Legha, with altogether seven projections to be shown in five separately constructed spaces. The total duration of the films is c. 1:15 mins.
Neshat’s new work is based on a banned book from 1989 by the Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur. The novel is set in 1953, the year when the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, vainly tried to avert a coup d’état mounted by American and British forces, whose task it was to reinstate the Shah as an absolute ruler in order to avoid the nationalisation of the country’s oil resources.
In her films, Shirin Neshat retains the magic realism of the novel and allows magic and the supernatural to interact with the realistic story. On the other hand, she deals freely with the novel’s action as she focuses on mood and tone in her work rather than seeking to create a straightforward film version of the novel.
It is the five main female characters – Mahdokht, Zarin, Munis, Faezeh and Farokh Legha – that Shirin Neshat portrays in a gripping drama about power and powerlessness. The women confront the lives they have lived hitherto in different ways and seek to escape from the city to a garden, where they for a time find a refuge. For these women, life is a struggle for freedom and survival in a society that lays down strict rules regarding religion, sex and social behaviour.
For Shirin Neshat, the coincidence in time between the Iranian people’s attempt to achieve democracy and independence and the women’s fight for survival – through madness, flight, active opposition or conformity – has been the driving force in the creation of her new, fascinating and unforgettable work, Women without Men.
About Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat was born in Iran in 1957 and had her artistic training in California during the 1970s and 1980s. On account of the Islamic revolution in her native country in 1979, she never moved back and now lives and works in New York.
The impetus to Shirin Neshat’s career came from a visit to Iran at the beginning of 1990s, during which she experienced the dramatic consequences of the clerical regime not least on the lives of women. She started with b/w photographs in which, dressed in the chador and with weapons and calligraphy to be seen on visible parts of her body, she directed her focus on compulsion, power, gender, life, death and martyrdom. Later came her large-scale innovative video works based on multiple projections; these included the work entitled Turbulent (1998), for which she was awarded the Golden Lion in the Venice Biennale in 1999. Essential themes in Shirin Neshat’s oeuvre are the relationship between man and woman, individual and society, power and powerlessness, sexuality and the conditions arising from exile.
Neshat starts out in her art from her Middle Eastern cultural background, but at the same time works with a universal, eternal and highly aesthetical idiom.
The curator responsible for this exhibition is Mona Jensen
"Women without Men"
The Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat’s monumental film opus, Women without Men, will be exhibited at ARoS. It is the world premiere of this major video cycle consisting of five video works.
Women without Men was created between 2004 and 2008. It consists of five video installations: Mahdokht, Zarin, Munis, Faezeh and Farokh Legha, with altogether seven projections to be shown in five separately constructed spaces. The total duration of the films is c. 1:15 mins.
Neshat’s new work is based on a banned book from 1989 by the Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur. The novel is set in 1953, the year when the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, vainly tried to avert a coup d’état mounted by American and British forces, whose task it was to reinstate the Shah as an absolute ruler in order to avoid the nationalisation of the country’s oil resources.
In her films, Shirin Neshat retains the magic realism of the novel and allows magic and the supernatural to interact with the realistic story. On the other hand, she deals freely with the novel’s action as she focuses on mood and tone in her work rather than seeking to create a straightforward film version of the novel.
It is the five main female characters – Mahdokht, Zarin, Munis, Faezeh and Farokh Legha – that Shirin Neshat portrays in a gripping drama about power and powerlessness. The women confront the lives they have lived hitherto in different ways and seek to escape from the city to a garden, where they for a time find a refuge. For these women, life is a struggle for freedom and survival in a society that lays down strict rules regarding religion, sex and social behaviour.
For Shirin Neshat, the coincidence in time between the Iranian people’s attempt to achieve democracy and independence and the women’s fight for survival – through madness, flight, active opposition or conformity – has been the driving force in the creation of her new, fascinating and unforgettable work, Women without Men.
About Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat was born in Iran in 1957 and had her artistic training in California during the 1970s and 1980s. On account of the Islamic revolution in her native country in 1979, she never moved back and now lives and works in New York.
The impetus to Shirin Neshat’s career came from a visit to Iran at the beginning of 1990s, during which she experienced the dramatic consequences of the clerical regime not least on the lives of women. She started with b/w photographs in which, dressed in the chador and with weapons and calligraphy to be seen on visible parts of her body, she directed her focus on compulsion, power, gender, life, death and martyrdom. Later came her large-scale innovative video works based on multiple projections; these included the work entitled Turbulent (1998), for which she was awarded the Golden Lion in the Venice Biennale in 1999. Essential themes in Shirin Neshat’s oeuvre are the relationship between man and woman, individual and society, power and powerlessness, sexuality and the conditions arising from exile.
Neshat starts out in her art from her Middle Eastern cultural background, but at the same time works with a universal, eternal and highly aesthetical idiom.
The curator responsible for this exhibition is Mona Jensen