“Politics, Society and Sexuality in Middle Eastern Feminist Art: Learning from Three Fertile Crescent Exhibitions” (original) (raw)
Related papers
From Demure to Demanding: Shirin Neshat on Iranian Women and the Black Chador
University of Florida Institutional Repository, 2020
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 has left a lasting impact on Iran’s society, economy, and politics, both domestic and international. Because of the violent protests and radical shifts in social relations that ensued as a result of the revolution, many Iranians fled the country—or were forced out because of the conflicts—in search of a more stable and enduring living situation. Shirin Neshat, an Iranian American artist, had left her country to pursue an education in the United States, but she was unable to permanently return once the events of the revolution took place. Mourning the loss of her home and attempting to make a new life for herself in the U.S., Neshat began a photographic practice (eventually expanding into film, video, and performance art) as a means of creative expression and exploration of her identity as an immigrant living in exile. With the shock she received upon first visiting the newly revolutionized Iran, Neshat began tackling issues of gender, politics, and religion with respect to the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. This particularly took shape through her reading and use of the black chador, a form of hijab, in her artwork. My paper analyzes Neshat’s photographs and films from the 1990s with respect to the politicization of the black chador, the artist’s search for a national identity, and the dichotomized binaries of black/white representing woman/man as a consistent theme throughout her work. Against the stereotypical Western gaze which would insist that the women depicted in Neshat’s oeuvre are helpless and “demure” victims, my analysis argues that these women are in fact articulating various forms of power, agency, and rebellion by “demanding” recognition from the viewer.
Many scholars have already written on the 1990s photographic series Women of Allah by artist Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), but the series' relationship to its written texts has not been fully explored or explained, such as in her photograph Rebellious Silence of 1994 ( .1). 1 This paper seeks to address this need by examining the importance of the written words inscribed on the images and texts that have created the ideal revolutionary woman in Iran during the Iranian Revolution (1978-79). In accomplishing this task, I argue two major points: first, one must read the Persian texts inscribed on these photographs or find their translations, as understanding what these texts say results in a more nuanced exegesis of the images. Neshat's appearance becomes subversive only when one reads the texts, thus dislodging prototypical representations of postrevolutionary Iranian women. Neshat's photographs offer more psychologically complex representations of Iranian women than the global mass media has projected.
Screening the Past, 2013
The recent proliferation of Iranian women's diasporic cinema testifies to the importance of recognising and mapping current trends within the growing field of transnational cinema. In particular, the contribution of exilic and émigré filmmakers reveals the creation of new intercultural cinematic narratives, identities and production methodologies. In her debut feature, Women Without Men (2010), Shirin Neshat inscribes not only her experiences as an Iranian exile but the process of her politicisation as a diasporic artist and filmmaker. Moving beyond the deeply personal reflections embedded within her installation works, Neshat attempts to correlate the injustices of the 1953 coup d'état against President Mossadegh with the failures of the Ahmadinejad government (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013). Women Without Men reveals Neshat's ongoing ambivalence about the possibility of a democratic and women-centered Iran, both as a geographical and historical entity, and as an imagined and poetic construct. Made in Casablanca, Morocco, Women Without Men never seeks to recreate an 'authentic' replica of Neshat's native Iran, rather it is more interested in revealing the contradictions and slippages within discourses of national belonging. An Orchard, the sublime and often sinister setting for much of the film, becomes emblematic of the exile's indeterminate state of 'unhomeliness'. The film thus not only refers to Iran's current struggle for democracy, but also continues to address Neshat's particular interest in the equivocal and liminal position of the diasporic individual and artist, as they reside between cultures and between homelands.
Contemporary Visual Art and Iranian Feminism
2017
Iranian contemporary visual artist and filmmaker, Shirin Neshat gives us a unique lens into contradictions within Islamic feminism. She uses her situation as a culturally-hybrid individual to mediate the dichotomy construed between Eastern and Western cultures and male and female relationships. Special attention is paid to her use of art as a window into systemic socio-political and gender issues she observes from the vantage point of her “third space” locus. In her photographic and cinematic work, she creates provocative juxtapositions built on binaries to expose biases. Her work is equally political and personal. She uses it to critique societies and to construct her own cultural identity. As an actor in the supranational women’s rights movement, with the support of the Art World, she raises gender consciousness across cultures via her artistic provocation. Islamic feminism navigates the space within this chasm and Islamic feminist art is a visual articulation of its carefully con...
Visual Discourses of (Un)veiling: Revisiting Women of Allah
2018
Albeit the fact that Shirin Neshat produced her first series of photography, Women of Allah in 1990s, it is hard to overlook the series’ immediacy and relevancy to our world today. Suffice it to say, the series is still on exhibition in different parts of the world which justifies its relevancy two decades after its production. The immediacy and relevancy of Women of Allah (1993-97) stems from the uneasiness and apprehension of the western world towards Muslims and veiled Muslim women. Neshat’s Women of Allah has the potential to function pedagogically and shatter the centuries old stereotypes of Muslim women while questioning the Iran’s restrictive and confining rules upon women. Contrary to what the title of this chapter might suggest, this essay is not only a description of Neshat’s Women of Allah --about which there is now a very lively and enormous literature. While reviewing her work and accentuating its dialogical and pedagogical function, I bring to surface images of Muslim women on Iranian murals and posters and I argue that these have been her specific source of inspiration.
The Girls of Enghelab Street: Women and Revolution in Modern Iran
Global Policy , 2018
Beginning with the 1891 Tobacco Protest, women have played a vital role in revolutionary Iran. In opposition to the post-9/11 zeitgeist's hegemonic framing of the Middle Eastern Woman, as bereft of agency, this paper highlights the agency of the Iranian woman and their involvement within revolutionary struggles in the modern history of Iran. What is of particular concern here is the ways in which hijab is utilized as a revolutionary symbol and the particular narrative of this performative trope as designated by "the West". The 1979 revolution provided a discursive space in which to rearticulate the hegemonic gender identities as formulated under the Pahlavi regime. Here, the ruptures and continuities of dominant gender identities are highlighted through the use of the chador as a placard for political action. Drawing on this framework of gender (re-)identification, the notion of Iranian womanhood was again contested during the 2009 Green Movement. In considering the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, this paper identifies the re-articulation of the masculine discourse of martyrology as a means of contesting the ideological apparatus of the state. Following from the Green Movement, "the Girls of Enghelab Street" again bring the issue of Iranian womanhood to the forefront of revolutionary action. Here, hijab is utilized, quite literally, as a revolutionary flag. While the use of the hijab here appears in stark contrast to that of the 1979 revolution, this protest draws on a definitive history of the headscarf as a marker of female revolutionary action.
DIALOGUES BETWEEN 'ORIENTALISM' AND MODERNISM IN SHIRIN NESHAT'S 'WOMEN OF ALLAH'
Local and Global Art Histories , 2006
This is a detailed analysis of Shirin Neshat's photographic series 'Women of Allah' (1993-) and their wider connections to photography theory, diaspora art practices in African American and Black British art and psychoanalysis. It examines her art as a cross-cultural movement across Iranian visual culture and North American art history.
2023
Jina was bundled into a police van with other female detainees bound for the notorious Moral Security Headquarters to undergo what is called 're-education'. The patrolmen threw insults at the women in the van. Jina resisted their taunts. They pushed her out her seat and slammed her head against the van several times. At the police station, as she was trying to convince the police that she was observing Hijab, she clutched her head suddenly and collapsed. Blood trickled from her ears. By the time they got her to hospital, Jina was in a coma. Three days later, she died. A heart attack, said the police, forging medical documents. A brain tumor from childhood, said a neurosurgeon on state TV. Her family confirmed that Jina was a healthy young woman with no pre-existing health conditions. Leaked medical scans confirmed the cause: a skull fracture, cerebral hemorrhage, and brain edema from severe trauma to the head. Protests began as soon as the news broke-first outside the hospital, then all around Tehran, before spreading across the country and igniting protests across the world. Women and girls throwing off their headscarves and tossing them onto pyres, police stations torched, burning wrecks of cars, protestors rounded up as riot police fired water cannons and pellet guns, the state blockading streets, shutting down communication networks and launching mass arrests. Eight months on, the initial spark of outrage has grown into a revolutionary movement on a monumental scale. The rage building in Iranian women and men for months, years, decades, has finally found its moment to erupt. The initial epitaph on Jina's tombstone read: 'You will not die. Your name will turn into a codeword-a symbol of not just women, but all marginalized, oppressed people, rising up together against an oppressive regime. Jina's death galvanized an intersectional identity of otherness,
THE WOMAN WITH A GUN: A History of the Iranian Revolution's Most Famous Icon
Brandeis University Senior Honors Thesis, 2016
*Only Introduction Is Available for Viewing. For Full Thesis, Go to Brandeis Digital Repositories* In the year following the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy, one image in particular proliferated in national and international press as indicative of the social revolution that had unfolded in Iran: that of the veiled woman with a gun. Much of the scholarly work on the aesthetics of Iran’s revolutionary culture has focused on the way embedded Shi’i cultural tropes expressed themselves visually in public space – primarily through the ta’ziyeh passion plays and the Ashura processions – and argues that it is through a lineage of Shi’i symbolism that we can locate imageries of women, chiefly through the figures of Fatima and Zeinab. Yet, the visual representations of women in the years leading up to 1979 pose a stark contrast to this explanation – militant women were compared not to Fatima or Zeinab but rather to figures like Leila Khaled of the Palestinian liberation struggle and Djamila Bouhired of the Algerian independence movement. Women were seldom shown as “a model of a daughter before her father, a wife before her husband, a mother before her children” – characteristics which chief revolutionary ideologue Ali Shariati had claimed Fatima embodied – but rather as fist-raising, gun-toting fighters. This thesis examines how we can account for this gap in the historiography of women’s revolutionary imagery, by tracing an additional lineage of aesthetics to transnational and Third Worldist visual cultures. Instead of viewing the Iranian Revolution as an “exception to the rule”, the work of this thesis asks how we can locate the Iranian Revolution within the global traditions of this era; and asks how Iranian revolutionary consciousness was itself influenced and inspired by the contemporaneous struggles, from Algeria to Nicaragua to Vietnam. Through mapping a number of prevalent symbols and gestures that formed a sort of vocabulary of resistance during the era – specifically, that of “the fist”, “the v-for-victory” sign, “the gun”, and “the militant woman,” this thesis looks at how Iranian revolutionary culture – and the place of women within it – came to adopt these era-specific codes of militancy. The work to map a transnational genealogy of political symbols can open up space to analyze the many aesthetics of the Iranian Revolution beyond the “Shi’i lineage” that has been assumed for it; and can provide new insights into the ways such transnational aesthetic traditions were in fact sustained, continued, and centered in the gendered iconographies of the Islamic Republic.