Shirin Neshat

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Shirin Neshat ( Viennale 2009)

Shirin Neshat (born March 26, 1957 in Qazvin , Iran ; Persian شیرین نشاط Shirin Neschat ) is an Iranian artist, filmmaker and photographer.

Coming from photography, Neshat has been devoting herself to film art since the mid-1990s, whereby the artist deals in particular with the situation of women in the Muslim world.

biography

Shoja Azari, Shirin Neshat and Babak Payami (Tirgan Festival in 2013)

Shirin Neshat was born in 1957 as the daughter of a respected doctor. The family belonged to the upper middle class.

She grew up in a western-oriented household and attended a Catholic boarding school in Tehran . Her father took a more progressive view of the social role of women than was the norm in most families at the time.

When Neshat left boarding school in 1975, her father made it possible for her to attend college at the age of 17, as did her brothers. To study art, she left Iran in 1979 and went to the United States, while Ayatollah Khomeini came to power through the Iranian Revolution . As a result of the revolution, Shirin Neshat's parents lost their previous status. A year after leaving Iran, Neshat moved to San Francisco to study at Domician College. She then enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where she received her Bachelor , Master of Arts in Performing Arts and Master of Fine Arts in Fine Arts .

After graduation, she returned to New York, where she married Kyong Park and had a son, Cyrus. She worked for the " Storefront of Art and Architecture " organization in Manhattan, which her husband had founded.

In 1990, one year after Khomeini's death, Neshat returned to Iran after eleven years in the United States. The conditions that she found there, the dichotomy in which she found herself with regard to the contrasts between Iran before and after the revolution, inspired her to create the photo series "Women of Allah" (1993-1997), thus began the first part of her work as an artist. The black-and-white pictures depict armed Islamic women in floor-length chador . As a special stylistic feature, the uncovered areas of the sitter's skin are overwritten with texts by contemporary Iranian poets such as Tahereh Saffarzadeh and others in the national language of Farsi. The lettering looks like calligraphic ornaments.

She visited Iran regularly until 1996, but after an unpleasant encounter with an Iranian politician at the Tehran airport, she left Iran for good. Since she was no longer satisfied with photo work after a while, a few years later she devoted herself to film and video art. Most of the video films that can be assigned to this second section of her work were made between 1997 and 2001. At this point in time, she began to open up politically with regard to Western values ​​and to question them. She had primarily referred to Islam in her previous work. In 1996 she created her first video "Anchorage", which took up the themes of her series "Women of Allah" again. This was followed by other videos that were projected parallel to two opposite walls, as well as the film trilogy "Turbulent" (1998), "Rapture" (1999) and "Fevor" (2000).

In 1999 she won the International Prize of the 48th Venice Biennale for “Turbulent” and “Rapture”.

Two years later she began working with singer Sussan Deyhim , a composer, singer and performance artist who worked in the field of experimental music for two years. Deyhim combined singing technique with digital processing and the Far Eastern musical style in order to unite parts of east and west in her music. During this phase of the collaboration, the video "Logic of the Birds" was produced, produced by RoseLee Goldberg, a respected art historian and former director of the Royal College of Art Gallery , and which is part of the third part of Neshat's creative process. She now also processed her feelings and fears of living as an Iranian in the USA after September 11th . This video premiered at the Lincoln Center Summer Festival in 2002 and was later shown in Minneapolis and London. In 2005 her work "Zarin" was created.

In 2009 Neshat received an invitation to the competition of the 66th Venice Film Festival for her feature film Women Without Men (Zanān bedun-e mardān) and was honored with the directing award.

In 2013 she was appointed to the competition jury of the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival . Neshat about her work: “I come from a world that is in every respect an extreme antithesis to the western world and currently represents the greatest threat to western civilization […] The challenge for me is to find a way between these cultures, the 'Orient 'and the' Occident '. "

In 2017 Neshat staged Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida at the Salzburg Festival in 2017 (musical direction Riccardo Muti ). Her second feature film Looking for Oum Kulthum was invited to the 74th Venice Film Festival in 2017 in the section Giornate degli Autori . On August 28, 2019, Neshat was awarded a Goethe Medal .

Shirin Neshat lives with the Iranian filmmaker Shoja Azari after her divorce from Kyong Park. She lives and works in New York City and Berlin.

Works

Shirin Neshat (2010)
  • Turbulent , 1998. Two-channel video / audio installation
  • Rapture , 1999. Two-channel video / audio installation
  • Fervor , 1999. Two-channel video / audio installation
  • Passage , 2001. One-channel video / audio installation
  • Logic of the Birds , 2002. Multimedia Performance.
  • The Last Word , 2003. One-channel video / audio installation
  • Mahdokht , 2004. Three-channel video / audio installation
  • Zarin , 2005. One-channel video / audio installation
  • Women without Men , 2008. Five video installations

Filmography

Awards

Publications

  • In conversation - in conversation. German English. Vice-Versa-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-932809-54-8 .
  • Christiane Weidemann, Petra Larass, Melanie Klier (eds.): 50 women artists you should know. Prestel, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7913-3957-3 , pp. 152-155.
  • Debra N. Mancoff: Women Who Changed Art. Prestel, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-7913-4732-5 , pp. 102-103.

Exhibitions

Web links

Commons : Shirin Neshat  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Cinema: Official Awards of the 66th Venice Film Festival. In: labiennale.org. September 12, 2009, archived from the original on April 9, 2010 ; accessed on January 12, 2020 (English).
  2. ↑ Christiane Weidemann, Petra Larass, Melanie Klier: 50 women artists who should be known. Prestel, Munich, 2008, ISBN 978-3-7913-3957-3 , p. 153.
  3. ↑ 74th Venice Film Festival: Shirin Neshat shows her new film at the Lido. In: KleineZeitung.at . July 26, 2017, accessed January 12, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Doğan Akhanlı, Shirin Neshat and Enkhbat Roozon awarded the Goethe Medal. Goethe-Institut, August 28, 2019, archived from the original on November 6, 2019 ; accessed on January 13, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Elaine Louie: A Minimalist Loft, Accessorized Like Its Owner. In: The New York Times . January 29, 2009, accessed January 12, 2020 .
  6. ^ Goethe medals against the trend towards simplification. In: Deutschlandfunk-Kultur “Kulturnachrichten”. June 3, 2019, accessed June 3, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Shirin Neshat. Budapest Műcsarnok (Budapest Art Gallery), archived from the original on April 26, 2014 ; accessed on January 12, 2020 (English, notice on the exhibition).
  8. ↑ Shirin Neshat. The Home of My Eyes: Museo Correr: 13 Maggio - 26 November 2017. Museo Correr, 14 March 2017, accessed on 12 January 2020 (Italian).
personal data
SURNAME Neshat, Shirin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES شیرین نشاط (Persian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Iranian artist and filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Qazvin , Iran