Subverted Reality and Rebellion with Shirin Neshat

Photography by Brigitte Lacombe | Interview by Nasim Nasr

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker renowned for powerful visual narratives that explore themes of gender, identity and society in the Islamic world. Her work often juxtaposes text and image, and uses photog- raphy, video and film to offer a poignant commentary on the political and social conditions of Iranian and Muslim women.

Characterised by its poetic and evocative nature, Neshat’s art has earned international acclaim, establishing her as a seminal voice in conversations about femininity, power and resistance within the context of oppressive regimes.

A-M Journal invited multi-disciplinary Australian-Iranian artist Nasim Nasr to interview Neshat, who has been her long-time hero. The conversation that unfolded highlights the many ways in which the two artists have coalesced around similar themes and experiences, and how being female Iranian artists living away from their country of origin has influenced their lives and careers.

Nasim Nasr: I moved to Australia in 2009 from Tehran, where I was always drawing nude and naked women’s bodies, but I wasn’t allowed to exhibit any of my work at Tehran Art University. It was at this point in my artistic career that my father encouraged me to leave Iran, so I came to Australia in 2009, and began my Master of Visual Arts (Research) [at the University of South Australia].

My professor, Anne Graham, immediately asked me to look into your work. When I discovered your art it opened up my whole practice – your career has had a huge influence on my own work and creative journey.

When I first came to Australia, I was taken to a nude beach where I could draw and paint nude bodies freely. But as soon as I entered the nude beach, I saw a sign saying that people are not permitted to wear clothes. In an act of subversion, I wore my grandmother’s chador – it was like breaking the rules in reverse. Looking back, I think that’s where my career started, on Maslin Beach.

I’m interested to know if there was a moment in your life where you first felt you were an artist.

Shrin Neshat: I was romantically an artist from childhood. People had always called me an artist, even though nobody knew what art was while I was grow- ing up in Iran. But when I came to the U.S. I went to school at UC Berkeley. I made art, but it wasn’t very good - it was a hodgepodge of Iranian art and Western art. I was only 20, so I didn’t really have much to say. It was just quite immature on my part. So, I spent my years of education realizing and discovering that I didn’t have it in me to be an artist.

Then I moved to New York from California and I worked for the next 10 years doing a lot of different things, but I didn’t make any art during that time. The reason I think I went back to making art and I became who I am is because of three things. One is New York. New York really impacted me because it wasn’t what school was like, or like the books I read, it was alive.

Second was the communities. I was being exposed to the finest people, the most intellectual, the most, I would say, anarchy’s bohemian artists. So, to be in New York, you felt alive... a part of something living. This was in the late eighties, and I had not been to Iran for 12 years after the revolution, but when I finally went back it had a huge impact on me. And once I went a few times, suddenly what New York had offered me in terms of vitality and what my work at this not for profit organization had taught me, was that I was going to do it. I learnt that art is not just intuitive, but it’s something you research, it’s all about the process. It’s there that I became truly educated.

And third was Iran. The idea of rediscovering a new Iran and then, of course, focusing on different things, being reunited with my family. And so, when I came back to New York, I was still a real New Yorker, but I had gained this new obsession, which was Iran. I wanted to keep that relationship alive, and the only way to do this was to live in NY and make art about Iran.

NN: At what point do you think the cultural understanding and awareness of Americans toward Iranian women, especially what Iranian women go through in Iran began to take hold? Now with the Women, Life, Freedom Movement, awareness is growing, but did you ever feel that you weren’t being understood by American culture?

SN: It’s a really good question. I remember when I started with my photog- raphy, specifically my series Woman of Allah, which was very provocative and politically charged, I had to deal with journalists and critics, not just in America, but in Europe, who weren’t educated about what was going on in Iran.

It was really amazing how reductive, especially then, their information and relationship to Iran was. And this not only includes the women’s situation but also, for example, one of the biggest issues for me was that a lot of Americans couldn’t even distinguish the difference between Iran and Iraq or Egypt or the Sunni versus Shia – the people who have more of an orthodox experience in Islam than Afghanistan.

For example, Iran originally was not an Islamic nation, whereas Egypt was. They also didn’t understand the relationship of Iran to Islam or their own relationship to Iran, or the coup d’état of 1953. So, when you’re talking about the average reporter or the average critic, who are supposed to be incredibly intelligent, their knowledge of history outside of art is very limited.

And therefore, you’re dealing with a lot of stereotypes and clichés. For ex- ample, my work the Woman of Allah was focused on women, and really questioned the idea of martyrdom and how women at the time volunteered to be militant. Yes, they were a minority group I was focusing on, but it showed how unusual and strange it was to see women in this role because they are usually very submissive, and as we know, they’re often discriminated against in our country, but suddenly they’re holding arms.

So, whatever I did, the view of Americans was always like, ‘Oh, those poor women from Iran.’ A lot of times my work shows or characterizes women as rebellious, as defiant, as fighters. Everything I’ve done is about women who break the rules, women who do not obey, women who confront, women who are outcast, women who refuse to assimilate, no matter if it’s a video or a photograph. There was something subversive about the images or the story, but people were still reading it as if I’m saying ’this poor woman.’

So very often I would get angry because they weren’t really paying at- tention to the art itself. They were just trying to rush...to reduce the work to their own conception, and a very simplistic one. These women are not losers, they’re not victims, they’re fighters. Ever since the beginning of my work, that’s what I have been saying. So, this has been a frustrating part because you find that even critics on the highest level still have a stereotyp- ical approach to understanding, not only Iranian, but Middle Eastern artists, because they simply don’t have enough knowledge about the history.

NN: That’s incredible. I get exactly the same feedback. Australia is so geographically isolated, they don’t always understand what limitation, restriction, oppression and suppression mean. There’s often a gap between what I’m trying to say and how much they understand it. However, I thought because America is so much larger and more connected to the world, you’d be more easily understood.

SN: Australia has a very outward understanding about the world – they look up to New York, they look up to Europe, and London and Paris. Whereas I think America has a very inward understanding towards their own status.

I think that when we talk about America, you have to talk about New York because the majority of this country has never really travelled. Their knowl- edge of the world is through television... and their information about Iran. And so, I would say maybe Australians probably travel more than the aver- age American or European.

There’s this vast difference between the American and European percep- tion of my work for example, because Europe has a history of lots of im- migrants. I think you have to separate New York, because it’s a different ballgame. But having said that, I feel that in the last two decades, even since I started as an artist, we have had this emergence of a lot of Middle Eastern artists, women artists, international artists in the contemporary art world. You see that the scene has changed, and so has the understanding of our work.

NN: Absolutely. I think even within Australia in the last five years, you see new groups and new waves of artists that are braver and stronger, and from many different backgrounds, and there seems to be a healthy appetite and audience for more diverse works.

SN: I think there’s another very important issue here because, as Irani- an women artists living outside Iran, it’s a question of our audience – how does the work communicate to our local Iranians, the ones living in Iran or outside, but also to the Western culture, including Australia and America?

Just yesterday I opened The New Yorker, and there was a major article about the children in Iran, the high-school students, and their revolt and re- fusal of wearing the hijab, and when I started to read it I realised that this is written for Americans, because it was very much going through the history of what happened... Because I knew what happened, I stopped reading it. I realise that sometimes we make art as if we’re speaking to our own people, and sometimes we make art in a way that serves others – the way you’re making it will reflect very differently on an Iranian.

I think your work, and maybe to some degree my work, is almost speaking to the audience in-between and making a bridge between the two – not totally talking to the Iranian audience, but also not totally for Americans, but somewhere existing in-between.

NN: I moved to Australia after studying at Tehran University, but you moved to the US when you were just 17 years old. How do you think your work has been affected by your time in Iran as a child?

SN: I think the reason my work is in that cross section between East and West, Iran and the US is because of my history. I was entirely educated here. I have been alone since I was 17 in this country. I’m not even able to talk about Iran like you could, and I don’t go back to Iran. Maybe you do? So, my world and relationship to Iran is a very specific one.

I think each one of us has it. I mean, the Iranian people living in Iran, a woman from Iran, she makes very different work than you do, or than I do, because our relationship to Iran is very different. I’m definitely highly influenced by conceptual art, the movement of feminism here and by other artists and filmmakers. I’m a New Yorker, really. But yet I’m so deeply root- ed in Iranian culture at the same time.

NN: When I moved to Australia, for some reason I really wanted to de- tach myself completely from Iran. And the reason for that was I dealt with a lot of restrictions there – I couldn’t even show my paintings or drawings in my final university presentation. My professor said if any security at the university saw what I had painted, that would be the end of the university. I ended up wrapping my artworks, and actually tearing a lot of them up from the anger of not being able to show them.

For a long time, I wanted to detach myself from those memories. But with this whole new ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement [the global movement in solidarity with Iranian women and girls seeking fundamental rights], I’ve found myself mentally going back to those days in university, and I started being very vocal, I started to advocate for Iranian women, and I began to connect with the Iranian community again.

What has been your experience with this movement?

SN: It’s interesting, because all this time the work that I’ve made was without exception, always characterising the women of Iran as defiant and as those who are always protesting against the system. It was always about empowerment, a woman within a repressive situation. I made a video on September 16, when Mahsa Amini died [while under arrest in Tehran], that dealt with sexual assault and rape in an Iranian prison, and how that caused fury and actual protest.

Suddenly the issues I’ve been dealing with in my work were exposed through this beautiful movement. I think for me, it was obviously the most euphoric experience.

It was euphoric and liberating to see the rest of the world take notice and advocate for Iranian women, but there is still a lack of understanding that’s going on, and horrific atrocities happening.

Interestingly, the thing everyone focuses on is the woman’s hijab, it’s how they embody the rhetoric’s and the ideology of this government. It’s unbe- lievable. And this is what my work has been about – women are so threat- ening to this society, to this government, because they defy their values.

So as euphoric and liberating as it was, let’s not forget the fact that it was also very tragic. And unfortunately, it became very toxic and divisive among Iranian people themselves who had this sense of unity and solidarity at first, but I’m afraid it has unleashed some very negative things among the Iranian community.

So, I don’t want to just say, ‘Oh, this was so great and euphoric’. I think every revolution has a process, and I’m hoping that it will continue, and keep its momentum.

NN: It’s at that point when women cannot hold back, but also the brutal government is not holding back. It’s a crucial point in their momentum.

But back to your work – I know you use the word ‘dream’ quite often in the title of your work. What does the word or idea of dreaming mean to you?

SN: Well, for me, most of the time my dreams are about my night- mares, so I feel that our subconscious, our dreams, are a place where we hide everything that we don’t want to face or expose, our anxieties, our fears – of displacement, of abandonment, of death, of violence, of war.

All day, all we do is hide those. And then at night it unleashes. But what I like about dreams is that, like surrealism and magic realism, they always have a foot in reality – places you’ve been, people you know – and a foot in a place that doesn’t make sense at all.

There’s no logic and it’s so ephemeral. It just goes very quickly. It’s like a poem, it’s like things that poetry usually makes reference to. It’s metaphors relating to reality. But at the time, nothing makes sense. So, for me, dreams, surrealism, magical realism are very wonderful languages for an artist because I’m not interested in reality... Pure reality. I’m interested in subverted reality.