Shirin Neshat: Islamic Counterpoints

A Binary World

Neshat's films are thoroughly inhabited by the chador, which has been her primary metaphor and bearer of meaning. It is an emblem of the contradictions--male vs. female, individual vs. community, nature vs. culture, tradition vs. innovation, violence vs. lyricism--that play out on opposite screens in the black-and-white trilogy Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000). The women in her films overcome the solemnity of the chador by singing, setting out to sea, flying into the imagination.

Turbulent was the first film Neshat made with the Iranian crew who have become essential to her work: composer and singer Sussan Deyhim, director of photography Ghasem Ebrahimian, and cowriter and sometimes performer Shoja Youssefi Azari. On facing screens, Turbulent takes the form of a musical duel between Azari, portraying a singer performing a love song with words by the great 13th-century mystic Rumi, and Deyhim, delivering her own eclectic composition. The audience stands in a space between the two screens, as if spectators at the duel. The man sings to a full house (to which, in the interest of the cinematic image, he turns his back), the woman to an empty auditorium. Nevertheless, it is no contest; Deyhim's explosive guttural inventions win.

Rapture faces off a hundred men inside an old fort (culture) and a hundred women in chadors outside in the desert (nature), showing male and female in stark separation again, on screens on opposite sides of a room. At first the men, all in white shirts and dark pants, are at play. They circle and chant; they are active, while the women seem to watch from a distance. Suddenly the roles reverse. In the film's climax, a woman dances on a drum, her bare feet seen in close-up; others hike up their black robes, push a small wooden boat into the water and put out to sea.

Fervor probes the sensual cost of repression to both sexes on separate side-by-side screens, with a spare esthetic: a woman in chador and a man are walking separate paths, which cross like lines on a Minimalist canvas near the beginning of the film. They traverse receding alleyways and disappear around a corner at the end--perhaps the same corner, probably not. In between, they sit on separate sides in a hall, the women's side black with chadors, the men's variegated in shades of gray and white. A charismatic itinerant preacher is performing a moral tale about sexual transgression. (At one point in her editing process, Neshat had subtitles translating the sermon, but she concluded that it robbed the scene of its poetry and ambiguity. Nevertheless, it is evident that he is illustrating his speech with drawings of a seduction.) The woman flees. Emotions are as divided as public lives for both sexes.

Neshat works her effects in a landscape of stone and sand, of primitive villages, courtyards and protected interiors. Her landscapes are at once characteristic and symbolic of the weight of a culture lost and remembered. It is not, however, the landscape of Iran, though it resembles it. Not certain of her welcome in her homeland, Neshat finds locations that suggest Iran's dramatic desert terrain or, as in the 2001 work Passage, transcend real time and place for more extensive allegorical significance.