Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence, Women of Allah series, 1994

Shirin Neshat: Darling of the American Art Scene

This October 2019 marks the opening of Shirin Neshat’s retrospective I Will Greet The Sun Again at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. This exhibition and the hype around it present a key opportunity for a critical analysis of the subject of Iranian representation in the Western art discourse and the political agendas behind it.

Neshat’s work comprises primarily of photography and film that embody the female figure and experience. She begins her career after returning to the United States from a short journey back home in which she encounters an Iran that has radically changed since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The first body of work to come out of this experience is the well-known Women of Allah (1994)photograph series. These high contrast black and white images portray religious figures clad under the veil, sometimes in prayer, skins covered in Arabic script, and weapons at hand. These are the images that propelled Neshat to international acclaim in the 90s, making her the most prominent Iranian-American artist to date. Since their inception, the Women of Allah have been imprinting the consciousness of Western audiences with a quintessential image of what Iranian identity and experience looks like.

Despite Neshat’s claim to be a feminist, her orientalizing work has primarily served to reduce the Iranian female experience to nothing other than one of oppression, suffering, and a desperate attempt at resistance. All the while, her representations collapse Iranian cultural differences into a general stereotypical idea of Muslim-ness or Middle Eastern-ness that is frozen in time and space. For example, her 2-channel videos Turbulent (1998) and Rapture (1999) blur all cultural, spatial, and temporal specificities. Turbulent is set in some desert landscape that isn’t Iran and can be imagined as anywhere in the Middle East or North Africa. Both videos literally divide the men and women and put them at odds with each other. In Turbulent, the men are portrayed as violent and savage. They are given the agency to act while the women stand in silence until they finally let out a tribal-like screech as an act of resistance. In Rapture, the male figure sings with an audience of men backing him up, while the female figure stands alone and silent in the dark, deprived of an audience. When she does finally utter a sound, it is again void of verbal language that can be understand and is more like an animalistic moan.

In her interview regarding the current exhibition at the Broad, Neshat says: “My intention is that the work would be absolutely ambiguous, beg for multiple interpretations, and build layers of meaning, but also seduce the people with form.” Neshat’s intention is in fact again and again sacrificed for a form that does seduce with exotic charm. As such, her portrayal of the Iranian experience refrains from disrupting the cliché Western belief that Iranian-ness can be anything other than a struggle for freedom of expression and the choked cry of women in the face of a patriarchic culture filled with men invested in oppressing them. For this, Neshat has been greatly rewarded in the West.

The issue that should be of concern for Iranians however, is not so much Neshat’s narrow representation focused on the experience of exile, oppression, pain, and displacement. The concern and question should rather be this: Why has the American art scene latched on to Neshat’s Orientalist lens the way it has for almost three decades, and persists to promote it to the extent that it does? Moreover, why does the Iranian Diaspora tolerate and even applaud the propagation of such narrow and demeaning representations?

While Neshat is entitled to her point of view and the form she chooses to give to that view, the American art scene’s choice to zero in on this particular representation can only mean two things: It is either too unaware and lazy to stretch its nose across the comfort of its pre-existing beliefs about Iranian culture and look harder for contemporary Iranian identities, experiences, and voices inside and outside Iran; or, it is fully aware of the implications of its choice to endorse and implant this one particular image of Iranian identity in the minds of audiences because that image helps it maintain a position of superiority in its perception of itself and that of everyone else’s. As far as the Iranian Diaspora is concerned, it is perhaps the four decades of Western ostracization that have made it such that they are willing to take any representation over no representation at all, even if that representation is reductive and offensive.

As a result of a success made from this particular representation of Iranian identity, the Western world has seen a flood of younger generations of Iranian artists who have adopted those same artistic tropes and victimizing rhetoric to gain visibility. These are artists whom for many, have made the choice to leave Iran, migrate to the West, and begin a new life founded on the American dream. However, as the realities of life in the Capitalist economical system of the United States set in, they must do what it takes to stay afloat. The easiest and safest strategy is to embark on a path that has already been tested and proven successful. Shirin Neshat’s legacy has been to pave that path.

ABC7’s coverage of the opening of the exhibition states: “ The photos are created to tell a universal story from a Middle Eastern perspective”. This my friends, simply isn’t true. What universal story are the reporters referring to exactly? The story told is from the perspective of an Iranian-American woman now in her 60s, who left her country of birth at 17 during the Pahlavi era, and gained celebrity status by depicting women whose lives she’s never lived, and by allowing her work to be politicized. Furthermore, this universal story is manufactured for a Western audience who is naive and under-informed about Iran and Iranians, and still imagines its culture as depicted by Orientalist artists of the likes of Jean-Leon Gerome. The fact of the matter is that contemporary Iran and Iranian identity is extremely complex, diverse, and in a constant state of reinvention. This makes it nearly impossible to understand the Iranian experience without in depth research into the history of Iran in the past century, the impact of ongoing Western intervention in Iranian politics, the diversity within the global diaspora, and the cultural changes within Iran over the past 40 years, especially the last 10. In short, an essentialist Iranian face and experience does not exist and to try and frame one can only come from ignorance.

Neshat herself may feel uncomfortable at the dis-proportionate attention she’s received all these years in comparison to other Iranian-American female artists. Perhaps this is what propelled her to curate the New York group exhibition by 13 female Iranian artists at the High Line Nine Galleries: A Bridge Between You and Everything: A Group Exhibition of Iranian Women Artists (NOVEMBER 7–24, 2019). Some of the artists in the show do follow along Neshat’s visual language and concerns, and thankfully some don’t. If the American art scene isn’t willing to shine a broader lens on the work of Iranian female artists, Shirin Neshat is at least using her name and platform to do so with this show. This is in my view, is her most feminist endeavor to date.

Let’s look at what politicization looks like:

A recent article was published by the Financial Times about this group exhibition using the following title: “Shirin Neshat on Iran’s exiled artists”. Exiled is a catch word often appropriated by Western publications, media, or artists themselves because it hooks the public’s attention. The reality is that many of the artists in the group show are legal immigrants to the U.S who have willingly left Iran, and some of them still live and practice in Iran. The use of the word “exiled” to describe the group show is misleading and serves primarily to perpetuate a victimizing and exoticizing story about the artists. But is this really necessary? Would people not have any interest in a group of Iranian female artists who are not exiled, suffering, protesting, crying, or dying?

As an intentional attempt to become woke, I urge audiences Western and Iranian alike, to keep in mind a few key points while walking through the galleries of Neshat’s retrospective I will See the Sun Again at the Broad, as well as the group exhibition in New York’s High Line Nine Galleries A Bridge Between You and Everything:

1. Every work you see is from the point of view of the artist who has created it. It does not represent the point of view nor the life experience of all Iranians. Sometimes, it does not even reflect the life experience of the artist but their imagination.
2. The Women of Allah photographs (1993–4) in which Neshat deploys her own body to depict the female experience after her visit to Iran, are depictions of her imagination as she has never actually lived the experience of the religious women she is representing.
3. Contemporary Iranian identity and experience is diverse, complex, and far from the Orientalist image constructed in the Western discourse.
4. As with going to any contemporary art exhibition, do your homework and learn about the artists whose work you’re going to see. Having a little information about their life experience and their practice will help you put their work into an objective context and sustain the awareness that they are speaking from their perspective alone, and that their representation does not speak for, nor represent Iranians at large.
5. There are big differences between Iranian artistic concerns in Iran and the concerns of the global diaspora. The work of those in diaspora often addresses identity, belonging, and home. That of Iranian artists still living in Iran does not. As such, the mainstream exilic discourse should not be confused for the national narrative of Iranians.
6. Know that there are many different kinds of Iranian experiences. Some Iranian artists were forced to leave Iran and some migrated by choice. Some cannot return for issues of safety due to political activism, and some visit regularly. Some embody Western stereotypes and some don’t. Please pay attention to those who do not fit your stereotypes because their voices are the ones that will reshape your gaze and bring it closer to a contemporary reality.

My hope for the future of Iranian art in the Western art discourse is to see more attention given to a greater number of artists with a diversity of backgrounds, voices, and approaches that are not necessarily invested in the subject matter of identity representation. And when attention is put on those who are invested in identity representation, to look for artists who subvert outdated and stereotypical ideas and forms. At the same time, it is imperative that Iranians (inside and outside of Iran) make a conscious effort to decolonize the Western lens they’ve adopted of themselves and begin to experience their reality and tell their stories from an Iranian and non Eurocentric perspective. For this to occur, much healing is needed. Healing from almost a century of conditioning that has led to the belief that Western culture is superior, better, or more advanced to theirs. This belief paired with 40 years of Western propaganda that has demonized Iran, has led to the sad acceptance that any attention is better than no attention, any representation better than no representation at all. But times are changing and Eurocentrism is losing its credibility. Now that people of color in the United States are beginning to reclaim the narratives of their identities, cultures, and histories, there is no turning going back to earlier models of representation. Now is a time of awakening for everyone, for whites and non-whites, for the West and its so called Others. It is a time to level the playing field, to re-draft the stories told, and to distinguish fantasy from reality, lies from truths, fact from fiction.