Shirin Neshat at the Broad: I Will Greet The Sun Again

Shirin Neshat was born and raised in Iran, but came to the US in 1975 for college and eventually settled in New York. When she returned to Iran in 1990 to visit her family, she was shocked by the transformation of her country under the ideological rule of the ayatollahs, the changes in appearance, dress, and behavior from what she remembered. The experienced galvanized her to respond by producing a captivating array of photography and film commenting on distinctions of male and female, who can speak and who is silenced, modernity vs tradition. Three decades of her work are on display for a few more weeks at The Broad downtown, in an exhibit called Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again. Her series “Women of Allah” from the 1990s shows images of women in traditional garments, with lines from modernist Iranian women poets and writers superimposed on their skin. (Persian calligraphy on skin is a motif that runs through much of her life work, with the words offering ironic contrasts to the images.) In one image, hands held up in prayerful supplication face the muzzle of a gun coming out from under a black chador (full body cloak/veil). In another image, a mother fully hidden in black chador holds the hand of her young son who is naked and covered in expressive henna tattoos, a stark comment on the comparative freedoms of men vs women in Iran. These type of contrasts are drawn out in short film works where she uses two opposing screens to show contrasting images. In one work, drawing on the idea that women are forbidden from singing in public in Iran, we see on the left a man on stage singing expressively to an auditorium filled with an audience of only men, while on the right we see a fully veiled woman standing in front of a microphone in a completely empty auditorium. In a series called Soliloquy, Neshat explores her own ex-patriot sense of not feeling fully here or there in Iran or America, in images of a chador-clad woman standing in front of modernist American buildings. A photographic series called the Book of Kings features three walls of portraits divided into Patriots, Villains, and the Masses. The villains are bare-chested and tattooed with images from the Book of Kings, a famous 11th century epic poem of Persian dynastic struggles. The patriots have modernist Persian poetry boldly inscribed on their faces, while the masses have much smaller inscriptions of unidentified commentary. The masses face the villains on opposite walls and can be seen their reflections. Another powerful series of portraits from 2013, entitled “Our House Is On Fire”, was inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings. These affecting portraits are mostly of Egyptians whose children had been killed in the protests. Revolutionary poetry is inscribed on these faces in calligraphy so small that you have to get very close to even see that it is there, muting the voice of the revolution against the expressive power of these faces of the bereaved. (This reminded me of a similarly inspired collection of portraits by Colin Davidson we’d seen in Dublin, of bereaved parents who’d lost children to “The Troubles”.) These are just some of the highlights of this impressive exhibition. (See full album of my photos from this exhibition.)