Shirin Neshat, Ramin, 2012.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features New York-based artist Shirin Neshat, who joins me to discuss the art she’s made in response to Iran’s Green Revolution and to the Arab Spring. “The Book of Kings,” an exhibition of Neshat’s work is on view at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York through February 11. A detail from Neshat’s My House is Burning Down (2012) is featured in this week’s banner.
Neshat has been the subject of major survey exhibitions at museums in Spain, Germany, England, Italy, Mexico, Canada and the United States. Among many other honors, she won the Silver Lion at the 2009 Venice International Film Festival for “Women Without Men” and the First International Award at the 1999 Venice Biennale. Next year the Detroit Institute of Arts will present a major retrospective of her work.
To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can stream the program through the player below.
In our conversation Neshat and I discuss:
- The passion she feels for her homeland of Iran even after having lived abroad for 37 years;
- The challenges inherent in making art for audiences in Iran and the Middle East when Neshat lives and shows in the West;
- The ways in which her art is seen in Iran today;
- How the uprisings in the Persian and Arab worlds motivated her newest work; and
- Why metaphor is such an important strategy for her. […]
For images of the works discussed on this week’s program, click here.
(via 3rdofmay)
Bad Girls série by Bahar Sabzevari from Robert Adanto’s new documentary Pearls on the Ocean Floor (video)
Pearls on the Ocean Floor is a thought-provoking documentary that examines the lives and works of Iranian female artists living and working in and outside the Islamic Republic. This unflinching and incisive study, featuring interviews with art luminaries Shadi Ghadirian, Shirin Neshat, Parastou Forouhar, Gohar Dashti (video) and others, captures the uncertainty of this momentous time in Iran’s history. Speaking with grace and honesty, these brave women express what is seldom seen in the western media: unique individual perspectives regarding issues of identity, gender, and the role that art plays in challenging the traditional stereotypes often associated with women in Iran. - Steve Nalepa
From the film’s website:
There is no better time than the present to examine this fascinating nation and no better approach than through the visual imagery of female artists. It is women who have collectively bore the brunt of an oppressive regime and the bias of a western media that has repeatedly constructed one-dimensional images portraying them as humorless, repressed, second-class citizens in black chadors. Pearls on the Ocean Floor challenges this stereotype and caricature obscuring the vibrant and robust culture in Iran and its diaspora.
Shirin Neshat’s directional debut, Women Without Men, winner of the 2009 Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, examines the 1953 British- and American-backed coup, which supplanted Iran’s democratically elected government with a monarchy.
In July 2009, Shirin took part in a three-day hunger strike at the UN headquarters in New York in protest of last year’s elections.
Further reading at The New Yorker: The Woman Behind the Screen and Shirin on the Green Movement.
