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Abstract
Since her early photographic series Women of Allah (1993−1997), the Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat has been either praised for her alternative representations of veiled Muslim women or criticised for practising self-Orientalisation. This article reflects on Neshat’s Land of Dreams (2019) where the artist turns her lens towards American people and landscapes, investigating how her aesthetic and dialogic search for the Other within a demographically diverse state in the US, New Mexico, challenge the pre-conditioned expectations of her works as art from the Middle East. Engaging with Neshat’s surreal interactions with her sitters in this photographic and video installation, the focus is how she becomes a mediator to show a dynamic of Relation, in Édouard Glissant’s sense of the term, and the complexity of the individuals’ minds and life experiences through blurring the lines between dream and waking life, fiction and reality, past and present. The analysis further explores Neshat’s viewpoint as a diasporic artist manifested in her visual strategies to facilitate a nuanced and fluid understanding of the artist’s own sense of identity, belonging and homeland.
Notes
1 Iftikhar Dadi states that through allegorical strategies in Women of Allah, Neshat individualises what was once ‘an anonymous figure in a mass public’ in Iranian Islamic regime propaganda. He argues how Neshat’s representation of the Muslim veiled woman transcends geographical and cultural boundaries, embodying both the archetype of the ‘supposedly subjugated silent woman’ and that of ‘menacing global terrorist’. In contrast, Iranian artist/art critic Barbad Golshiri highlights an inherent similarity between the aestheticisation of the veil embodied in Neshat’s art practices and the way in which an ideological regime such as the Islamic Republic of Iran beautifies and promotes its regulations and dress codes. Iftikhar Dadi, ‘Shirin Neshat’s Photographs as Postcolonial Allegories’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol 34, no 1, 2008, pp 125–150; Barbad Golshiri, ‘For They Know What They Do Know’, e-flux Journal, no 8, September 2009.
2 Foad Torshizi, ‘The Unveiled Apple: Ethnicity, Gender, and the Limits of Inter-discursive Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art’, Iranian Studies, vol 45, no 4, 2012, pp 549–569; Somayeh Nori Shirazi, ‘The Articulating-self Inside Out: Katayoun Karami and Becoming a Woman’, in Ceren Özpınar, and Mary Kelly, eds, Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020, chapter 5
3 Dina Ramadan, ‘Regional Emissaries: Geographical Platforms and the Challenges of Marginalisation in Contemporary Egyptian Art’, Proceedings of Apex Conference, vol 3, 2004, https://apexart.org/conference/ramadan.htm
4 Political tensions between the US and Iran are the result of a complex history going back to the 1953 CIA-backed coup that brought the shah to power and the 1978–1979 Iranian Revolution and ensuing hostage crisis, and have led to decades of diplomatic estrangement and ongoing conflicts of interest.
5 Hubert J M Hermans, ‘The Dialogical Self as a Society of Mind: Introduction’, Theory & Psychology, vol 12, no 2, 2002, pp 147–160
6 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, vol 8, Theory and History of Literature, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2013
7 Fereshteh Daftari, ‘Introducing Art from the Middle East and Its Diaspora into Western Institutions’, in Hamid Keshmirshekan, ed, Contemporary Art from the Middle East: Regional Interactions with Global Art Discourses, I B Tauris, London, 2015, p 197
8 Fereshteh Daftari, ‘Islam or Not’, in Without Boundary: Seven Ways of Looking, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006
9 Shirin Neshat interviewed by Babak Ebrahimian, ‘Passage to Iran: Shirin Neshat Interviewed by Babak Ebrahimian’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol 24, no 3, September 2002, pp 44–55
10 In ‘Introducing Art from the Middle East’, op cit, Daftari reflects on the exhibition ‘Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking’, which she curated at MoMA New York in 2006. She highlights the disparity between her curatorial intent and the critical reception, attributable to the preconditioned expectations of Western viewers who perceive modern and contemporary art from the Middle East as an extension of Islamic art.
11 For critiques of this literature, see Hamid Dabashi, ‘Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography’, in Hamid Dabashi and Shirin Neshat, Shirin Neshat: La ultima palabra, Octavio Zaya, ed, Charta, Milan, 2005, pp 53–79; Foad Torshizi, ‘The Clarity of Meaning: Contemporary Iranian Art and the Cosmopolitan Ethics of Reading in Art History’, doctoral thesis, Columbia University, 2017.
12 Torshizi, ‘The Clarity of Meaning’, op cit, p 23
13 Daftari, ‘Islam or Not’, op cit, p 20
14 Torshizi, ‘The Clarity of Meaning’, op cit, p 191
15 Cited and translated by Torshizi in ‘The Clarity of Meaning’, pp 185–186. For Farsi sources see: Aydin Aghdashloo, ‘مشکل خانم شیرین نشاط [The Problem of Madam Shirin Neshat]’, حرفه : هنرمند [Herfeh Honarmand], no 3, winter 2003, p 137; Reza Farrokhfal, ‘اگزوتیک بودناهمیت [The Importance of Being Exotic]’, حرفه : هنرمند [Herfeh Honarmand], no 3, winter 2003, p 145.
16 A symptom of this reductive and homogenising cultural framing is the recent controversy around Western art institutions’ use of Neshat’s early work, produced in the 1990s, as an expression of solidarity with the liberation movement Women, Life, Freedom in Iran in 2022. While the criticism is valid in terms of highlighting how institutions oversimplify and erase the nuanced demands of the Iranian protestors, the argument often echoes earlier observations of reactionary receptions to Neshat’s work, as noted by Torshizi. For more on the backlash over displaying Women of Allah, see Pegah Pasalar, Katayoon Barzegar and Niloufar Nematollahi, ‘The Commodification of Jin, Jiyan, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom) by Art Institutions in the West’, Another Screen, 2022, www.another-screen.com/films-from-iran-for-iran, accessed 8 May 2023.
17 Hamid Dabashi, ‘Bordercrossings: Shirin Neshat’s Body of Evidence’, in Hamid Keshmirshekan, ed, Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture: Essays by Hamid Dabashi, Anthem Press, New York, 2019, p 266, p 267
18 The artist in conversation with Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Ondaatji Wing Theatre, London, 2020; see also Fi Churchman, ‘Shirin Neshat Builds a Land of Dreams’, ArtReview, 2 December 2021, https://artreview.com/shirin-neshat-builds-a-land-of-dreams/, accessed 15 April 2023
19 ‘At The Modern – Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again’, Art This Week, YouTube, 19 April 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=72z2SL8rzlI&ab_channel=artthisweek, accessed 9 May 2023
20 The video installation has evolved into a double-channel work, distinct from its original presentation at the Goodman Gallery, upon which my reading is based. In the current version the videos are exhibited side by side under the unified title Land of Dreams.
21 Churchman, ‘Shirin Neshat Builds a Land of Dreams’, op cit
22 ‘Women for Women Event: Shirin Neshat in Conversation with Louise Buck’, Goodman Gallery, 26 March 2020, https://vimeo.com/401312843, accessed 20 April 2020
23 Art This Week, ‘At The Modern – Shirin Neshat’, op cit
24 ‘Women for Women Event’, op cit
25 The Corn Mother, a mythological figure of North American Indigenous agricultural tribes, is responsible for the origin of corn. The story has multiple versions, with the ‘immolation version’ depicting her as an old woman who produces corn by rubbing her body in secret. When this is discovered by people, she is accused of witchcraft and killed, and corn grows from her body or burial site.
26 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing, trans, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1997
27 Celia Britton, Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1999, p 25, cited in Deniz Sözen, ‘The Art of Un-belonging’, doctoral thesis, University of Westminster, 2019
28 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, op cit, p 11
29 Ibid, p 16
30 Ibid, p 49, p 62
31 Ibid, p 17
32 Manthia Diawara, ‘Édouard Glissant’s Worldmentality: An Introduction to One World in Relation’, South as a State of Mind, documenta 14, issue 4, 2017. Diawara highlights Glissant’s liking for Italian neorealist films and for Jean Rouch’s ethnographic documentary Les maîtres fous (1955), noting their poetic and complex narratives that make them more opaque than more conventional forms of realism and documentary filmmaking.
33 Irit Rogoff, ‘Oblique Points of Entry’, in Keshmirshekan, ed, Contemporary Art from the Middle East, op cit, especially pp 38–39
34 Ibid, p 42
35 Erin C Devine, ‘From Translation to Transgression: The Feminism(s) of Shirin Neshat’, doctoral thesis, Indiana University, 2011
36 Jane Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performativity, and Exile, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1999, p 92
37 Richard Francaviglia, Go East, Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient, Utah State University Press, Logan, Utah, 2011, p 234, p 14, p 243, p 244
38 The context for Blocker’s argument on the themes of exile and travel is the Cuban-American artist Anna Mendieta. In Where Is Anna Mendieta?, Blocker explores how Mendieta’s performative engagement with her body and the earth mobilises essentialising binaries such as home–exile, male–female and white–non-white bodies. Referring to Blocker’s analysis, Devine makes a comparison between Neshat’s early video artworks and Mendieta’s oeuvre. Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta?, op cit, p 92; Devine, From Translation to Transgression, op cit, pp 167–178.
39 Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta?, op cit, p 93
40 Devine, From Translation to Transgression, op cit, p 167
41 Rogoff, ‘Oblique Points of Entry’, op cit, p 48
42 Churchman, ‘Shirin Neshat Builds a Land of Dreams’, op cit
43 Stuart Hall, ‘The Spectacle of the “Other”’, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Sage, London, 1997, p 234
44 Devine, From Translation to Transgression, op cit, p 238
45 Churchman, ‘Shirin Neshat Builds a Land of Dreams’. Neshat made a feature film called Land of Dreams in 2021. In it Simin plays a role akin to a dream-catcher, just as in the video installation; however, her responsibilities differ as she is now employed by the US government instead of the Iranian colony, and her mission entails spying on a secluded Iranian community.
46 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p 18
47 Manthia Diawara, ‘One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara’, Journal of Contemporary African Art, no 28, 2011, pp 4–19, at p 6, p 9
48 Rogoff, ‘Oblique Points of Entry’, op cit, p 43, p 49