I Will Greet the Sun Again
Shirin Neshat in conversation with Valentine Umansky
Shirin Neshat and Valentine Umansky discuss Iranian poetry, North-American politics and immigration, power dynamics within the cinema industry, and the many women they admire, including film director Forugh Farrokhzad and singer Umm Kulthum.
Shirin Neshat, Land of Dreams, 2019. Video still. Double-channel video/audio installation. HD video monochrome. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
Valentine Umansky: It all starts with your retrospective at the Broad in Los Angeles. It was the last exhibition I saw before the pandemic, in February 2020. I was then scheduled to take a trip to the UK and ended up stranded in Europe, as Donald J. Trump closed the international borders!
Shirin Neshat: Oh yes, you were based in Ohio at the time.
VU: Yes, and despite being a visa holder, I was never able to return. No matter in what context you immigrate to the US, it’s always a nightmare.
SN: It got worse over the last few years, don’t you think?
VU: With the last presidency, I would say.
SN: So, what happened? You stayed and got another job in the UK?
VU: Basically. At least I got to see your retrospective before I left!
SN: How shall we begin our conversation?
VU: Well, I have a ritual for those. Do you have a piece of paper and a pen?
SN: I do.
VU: May I ask you to write down, without speaking them out loud, two lines of a poem or song lyrics that are dear to you.
SN: In Farsi or in English? [laughs]
VU: Whatever you prefer, it doesn’t have to be English.
SN: Done!
VU: All right. I’ll ask you about it later but it’s a nice way to start, I think.
SN: There is poetry I’ve used over and over in my work, which I can write with my eyes closed.
VU: We can begin with this actually, since poetry is omnipresent in your work. How would you define your relationship with literature?
SN: Well, I grew up in Iran. Iranians are known for their interest in ancient, modern, and contemporary literature. My own father would recite poetry at home, sometimes to make a point. I remember that in high school, in our small town, we were reading complex Western existentialist writers.
In some ways, I consider myself a poet too. I’m drawn to poetry for its allegorical, symbolic values. Through the use of metaphors, we can be subversive without breaking the rules. Let’s not forget that I grew up under a dictatorship; censorship was a way of life. Iranians have learnt to be imaginative in how they express and perceive art, through enigma and symbolism.
IN SOME WAYS, I CONSIDER MYSELF A POET TOO. I’M DRAWN TO POETRY FOR ITS ALLEGORICAL, SYMBOLIC VALUES. THROUGH THE USE OF METAPHORS, WE CAN BE SUBVERSIVE WITHOUT BREAKING THE RULES. LET’S NOT FORGET THAT I GREW UP UNDER A DICTATORSHIP; CENSORSHIP WAS A WAY OF LIFE. IRANIANS HAVE LEARNT TO BE IMAGINATIVE IN HOW THEY EXPRESS AND PERCEIVE ART, THROUGH ENIGMA AND SYMBOLISM.
In 2009, I adapted Shahrnush Parsipur’s magic realist novel Women Without Men (1990) into a movie. It’s a beautiful story, written by an Iranian woman. Other than her, the one poet I really fell in love with was Forugh Farrokhzad, who died at the age of thirty-two. Her work is essential to Iranian modern literature. Although she passed in the 1960s, way before the revolution, she tackled issues of religion, sexuality, feminism, and politics with such a sense of clarity and rebelliousness. In the most timeless and universal manner.
VU: She also shot an incredible film . . .
SN: The House Is Black (1962), yes. I often think about what Forugh represents to us Iranian women: her beauty, her vulnerability, her painful relationship to men, to motherhood. Her isolation in the Iranian society. And despite all this, the majestic legacy she left behind. I must admit I’m drawn to iconic women artists, poets, writers, and singers who have made contributions to culture while living challenging lives.
VU: At the start of the first lockdown, I initiated a film exchange with a friend, filmmaker Michelange Quay. Well, Farrokhzad’s is one of the first I shared.
SN: You screened The House Is Black?
VU: Yes. It was an interesting perspective to embrace in the early time of lockdown, as a way to reflect on what confinement means politically.
SN: An effortlessly beautiful film, which shows how one can find grace in the horror of a disease.1 Something I like about both Forugh and Shahrnush Parsipur is that they can’t be bound within the Iranian society. Their language transcends beyond the specificities of their culture.
VU: That’s also the case for Nizami Ganjavi, whom you refer to in one of your works.
SN: Yes. I wasn’t as familiar with his poetry but Ganjavi is Persian. Some consider him Iranian, some Azeri. When I started the series The Home of My Eyes (2015), I thought it would be interesting to inscribe some of his poetry on the portraits I took there.
Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence, 1994. From Women of Allah series. Ink on LE silver gelatin print. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
VU: That’s a good segue into your relationship with literature and calligraphy.
SN: The nature of my photographic practice changed over time. Initially, I was taking self-portraits, but that ended with Book of Kings in 2012. The series is comprised of sixty portraits divided into three groups.2 It develops an allegorical narrative about the 2009 Green Movement in Iran, the Arab Spring, and the contagious revolutionary uprisings that spread across the entire Arab world. The series focused on notions of patriotism, devotion, and self-sacrifice, giving space to this youth who fought for democracy but was consequently confronted with systematic brutality, arrests, and torture.
The following year, with Our House Is on Fire, my photographic work took a new turn, and got closer to the documentary. I no longer photographed friends but sought people out. I traveled to Egypt, meeting and photographing people. With the help of friends and translators, I interviewed elderly, poor, religious people, mainly from the Muslim Brotherhood community, who had suffered a great deal during the Egyptian revolution. They shared their stories and experiences as they shed tears.
It’s in 2014 that I got invited to work in Azerbaijan, a country known for its multiethnicity. In this country, which shares borders with Iran, and where my mother’s roots come from, I interviewed Azeris from various ethnic origins: Armenians, Russians, and Turks. I asked what “home” meant to them and incorporated the responses in Farsi on their bodies. This theme was particularly poignant for someone like me, to whom the idea of “home” remains an unresolved, emotional issue.
The latest work, Land of Dreams (2020), frames my perspective about the United States, where I have lived longer than in my country of birth, a country I cherish but can be critical of. I chose to film and take photographs in the Southwest, partly because New Mexico feels similar to the sublime landscapes of Iran. I went from place to place, visiting communities from various ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds, including Native Americans, African Americans, Latin American migrants, and Angelinos. The purpose was to talk about their experiences as native or naturalized Americans during the post-Trump era, a time of blatant white supremacy, rising conservatism, racism, and anti-immigrant policies. It was there in the Southwest that I bonded with individuals who, like me, were holding onto that idea of the United States as a “land of dreams,” despite their anxiety about the future.
Shirin Neshat, Land of Dreams, 2019. Video still. Double-channel video/audio installation. HD video monochrome. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
VU: Your choice of titles often strikes me. Land of Dreams, for example, functions on a reversal of “dreamland,” an expression often used by foreigners aspiring to emigrate to the United States. I also think of scenes seen through the perspectives of two different groups, for example. Perspective reversals seem to recur in your work. I wondered if you could elaborate on this a bit.
SN: I was thinking about it yesterday, how everything I’ve done, from the photographic series Women of Allah (1997) to the feature film Women Without Men (2009), revolves around duality. An obvious explanation would be that I am a person of exile, a true expression of hybridity. I’m Iranian but not fully Iranian, American but not entirely American. I’m always something in between, never quite a fit, and my work seems to have embraced this form of contradiction.
Land of Dreams opens onto this monumental, Southwest desert, which is paired with a claustrophobic industrial space: the colony. It’s a man-made, authoritarian, and oppressive environment, which looks like a nuclear facility and evokes ex-Soviet bureaucratic offices. In it, men and women are dressed in white lab coats, and are busy receiving, processing, and analyzing American citizens’ portraits and dreams. The colony acts as a political satire of the Iranian government’s absurdities and perpetual anti-American rhetoric. Once outside the colony, the viewer is faced with a vast, natural landscape, which borders an American town, in which citizens reveal their anxieties about displacement, abandonment, and loss.
VU: Since you mention them, I was going to ask, do your dreams look like your films?
SN: Roja (2016) is a shot-by-shot manifestation of one of my dreams. In recent years, most of my dreams have featured my mother, who lives in Iran. Roja portrays an Iranian woman in a Western context, who is looking far to the East. Suddenly she sees her mother appear in the distance. As she runs toward her mother, she discovers that her mother has turned into a monster, who soon pushes her away. I’ve always interpreted this dream as the fear of losing my now-elderly mother, and how that loss could be the final breaking point between my motherland and myself.
VU: The museum version of Land of Dreams also felt strongly autobiographical. I remember thinking about the main character, an art student on an assignment to photograph U.S. citizens and ask about their dreams, “oh, but this is Shirin.”
SN: She is my alter ego, in a way. In fact, if you study my recent video work, Roja, Sarah (2016), Illusions and Mirrors (2013), and now Land of Dreams, the female protagonists all have similar physiques (small, with large eyes) and are dressed in black. Intuitively I have created projections of myself. It’s interesting to see how I started with self-portraits and now I have my muses playing me.
Changing the subject a bit, I wanted to ask for your opinion about the presentation of Land of Dreams. At the Broad, I exhibited the two videos in different rooms so the viewer had to watch each separately. But there were new restrictions due to COVID-19 when I prepared the work for my exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in New York. As the gallery could not build two dark rooms, I decided to edit a composite version of the videos so they could be shown simultaneously, side by side, in an open space. Later, I realized that this presentation fitted the meaning of the piece better. Notions of dualities were made apparent: natural landscape versus claustrophobic industrial space, dream versus reality, Iranian versus North-American culture. Unexpected coincidences also started to appear, which was quite magical, as when the judge is talking about an old immigrant lady on one screen, and she appears in her bed on the other. You saw both versions so . . . what did you think?
Shirin Neshat, Rapture series, 1999. Gelatin silver print. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; and Noirmontartproduction, Paris
VU: Although they are incredible standalone pieces, I feel like I understood the work better seeing the videos side by side. I noticed characters looping in and out of each screen but, more importantly, the composite made obvious the carefully controlled timing of each. This binary structure reminded me of your 1999 piece, Rapture, which oscillates between groups of women and men. When in a museum, it was installed on two facing screens, which forced viewers to turn around to see first the men, then again for the women’s answer, in a call-and-response kind of way. As viewers, we were immersed, orchestrating the dialogue.
SN: In many ways, the audience becomes the editor. For Turbulent (1998), it was different.3 You had the male character, Shoja,4 and the female, Sussan,5 taking turns. With Rapture, I made it so that there were moments of simultaneous activity and then pauses, men looking at the women, and vice versa, until they both became active again.
Thinking back to this idea of opposites, Soliloquy (1999), which by the way is the only video I ever performed in, has certain parallels with Land of Dreams. It is a double channel projection, one taking place in the West (filmed in Albany and New York City) and the other shot in the East (Mardin, Turkey.) In Land of Dreams, the main character navigates between Iranian and North-American landscapes and, like my character in Soliloquy, Simin is always wearing black.
VU: I wanted to ask you about this constant.
SN: Think about Turbulent, my first video: the woman wears black, while the man is in a white shirt. Then comes Rapture, same thing. In Passage (2002), the film I made with Philip Glass, all men are black silhouettes, carrying a body across the desert. Roja, Sarah, Illusions and Mirrors, all women in black. That way all characters transform into silhouettes.
VU: I was thinking about Illusions and Mirrors actually, in which Natalie Portman is dressed in black as well. Aside from the color, it’s her rather flowy silhouette that struck me. Her skirt is literally like a veil.
SN: A ghost.
VU: Exactly. My guess was that the black and white allowed for your characters to become interchangeable. It makes the silhouettes atemporal, which connects with what we talked about, the universality of the themes you choose. As much as you’re talking about the Iranian revolution, it could also refer to Egypt.
SN: I care about simplicity but also like the characters to never blend in, to stand out like a silhouette. I almost always photograph people in black clothes, so as to not be distracted by color or design. That way, we can focus on facial expressions.
VU: Is that why the museum version of Land of Dreams is in black and white?
SN: There is a severity to black and white that I like. It emphasizes duality. Even landscapes look better; they are less believable . . . how can I say?
VU: Abstract.
SN: Yes. By losing color, you lift some of the realism of your concepts or narratives. We really thought about this factor for the feature version of Land of Dreams but, in the end, we chose color.
VU: I find that connection to timelessness distinctive. In Land of Dreams, we are invited to meander through a surrealist dream. The only moment that brings us back to reality is when we see Arabic written on the spine of folders, on the colony’s bookshelf. The calligraphy calls back reality.
SN: Interesting. Land of Dreams seems to provoke different interpretations from the viewers. With the composite version, it is even more complex because the audience has to constantly figure out the relationships between the two screens. If, for example, one chooses to focus on one screen for long, chances are that they will lose the thread in the narrative.
Shirin Neshat, Looking For Oum Kulthum, 2017. Film still. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of the artist and Razor Film.
VU: I also wanted to ask you about the choice of color in Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017).
SN: Well, that could not have been shot in black and white. It is a period film, paying tribute to Umm Kulthum who lived during the time of Technicolor. The film references those Egyptian posters of icons—the divas of the time, who were so lush, important, and full of exaggerated colors. Think of Youssef Nabil’s work.6 It’s this era. Umm Kulthum was a fashionable woman, I didn’t want to take that away. The film also had to be faithful to aspects of Egyptian history, at a time when the country was fully cosmopolitan. Egyptians would have never forgiven me for turning it into a black and white video piece.
VU: It’s interesting. You just said: “Egyptians would have never forgiven me.” That’s exactly what the director says in the film!
SN: Yes, the film speaks about being apologetic and nervous while sharing the perspective of a non-Egyptian daring to make work about the biggest Egyptian icon of all time. The filmmaker is transparent about the film’s flaws, and her refusal to turn her subject into a hero. The film was an experiment, a film inside a film, and an artist’s reflection about another artist. Meanwhile, Egyptians expected a biopic, and I was not interested in that. Looking back, I’m proud of it because it genuinely makes a point about the impossibility of satisfying everyone.
VU: It also clearly talks about power dynamics in the cinema industry. We see producers backing out, tension increasing between the director and one actor, and conversely, the affection that develops between the lead actress and the director. Her fragility is perceptible until that moment when she steps out of the power play and says, “It’s okay, it doesn’t have to be perfect.”
SN: It took a lot of courage to shoot this film and I’m happy to have invested in it, not only as a tribute to the legendary Umm Kulthum, but also to raise important questions about what it takes to be an artist, and particularly a woman artist.
VU: I appreciated how the film shows three stages in a woman’s life: the young actor, the established director, and the older Umm Kulthum. Quite the opposite of the timelessness we were discussing earlier. In a way, that’s a film you couldn’t have made earlier in your career.
SN: You’re absolutely right, and I’m not sure why I felt such pressure to make this film since it was outside of my cultural, thematic aims, but I learnt a lot. Moving in between the cross section of visual arts and cinema was special. It is not unique to me, many artists including Steve McQueen and Matthew Barney have tried that, but I believe we all found our own balance.
VU: I think the way you operate, between video art and features, is similar to your practice that merges photography and calligraphy. Maybe it’s trickier to live in between, but isn’t it also the very challenge you enjoy?
SN: Working between mediums I’m not trained in at all! [laughs] You’re right, and to be honest my daily practice at the studio is a bit schizophrenic. On any given day, I’m dealing with curators, museums, gallery owners, producers, actors, film festival directors, et cetera. There’s something exhilarating and challenging in managing different practices but it keeps me on my toes. Right now, I’m interviewing composers for my new film, and, as they have no idea who I am and I know little about them, it feels a bit like a blind date!
Shirin Neshat, Turbulent, 1998. Video still. Two-channel video/audio installation. 16mm black-and-white film transferred to video. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
VU: You brought up composers, so let me ask you about sound. In Roja, which opens with Anohni singing,7 there is a scene that heavily relies on voiceover. You also mentioned composer Philip Glass earlier in our conversation. I was wondering how the sonic dimension is incorporated in your work?
SN: My whole musical experience started with Turbulent, which marked the start of a collaboration with the singer and composer Sussan Deyhim. I later worked with Ryūichi Sakamoto and Philip Glass, who were far more minimal and gave me a new perspective about the value of music on film.
VU: Less is more.
SN: I went far more minimal. With Sarah, Roja, and Illusions and Mirrors, we had very little music, mainly sound design. With Land of Dreams, we have only one melody, the beautiful sound of the setar, a Persian instrument, composed and played by Iranian singer-composer Mohsen Namjoo.
VU: It seems like you had three phases. There was the first one with Sussan Deyhim then minimal moments with Glass.
SN: Sonically, it has been an evolution. [laughs]
VU: Now, what phase would you say you’ve reached?
SN: I appreciate silence far more than I used to. When you hear continuous music, you become neutral to it. I learned that from Women Without Men, in which we maintained a lot of silence. Once Ryūichi Sakamoto’s sweeping music came in, it felt like a reward.
VU: You mention those silences but, in Women Without Men, the radio is extremely present. The main character is obsessed with the news, which made me reflect on radio as a commonality. When there is a coup d’etat, it’s always through the radio that the announcement is made. That’s also the case in your film: the army takes over the broadcasting company. Sound can make manifest this imposition of a new power structure.
SN: One of my early videos, Pulse (2001), tells the story of a woman whose entire relationship to the outside world is through the radio. She never leaves her home. We see her murmuring a love song she listens to on the radio. The whole scene has a very sensual, almost erotic, tone because of how she interacts with the singer’s voice. I found radios to be very powerful . . . but these days, it’s all on the computer. [laughs]
VU: I hear you! Maybe now it’s time for me to ask: What did you write on that paper earlier, Shirin?
SN: Guess what, it’s a poem by Forugh Farrokhzad!
VU: Of course. [laughs]
SN: It was also the title of my exhibition at the Broad. It reads:
به آفتاب سلامی دوباره خواهم داد
I Will Greet the Sun Again.
VU: Perfect way to end.
Shirin Neshat, Artist
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born visual artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat works with the mediums of photography, video and film, through which she creates complex human narratives addressing the universal themes of gender, displacement, oppression, and identity.
Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and museums worldwide and has been the recipient of the Golden Lion Award – the First International Prize at the 48th Venice Biennial (1999), the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival (2009), The Crystal Award (2014), and the Premium Imperiale (2017), amongst others.
Valentine Umansky, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern, London
As a curator, author and critic, Valentine Umansky has worked for various institutions dedicated to visual arts and is currently acting as Curator, International Art at Tate Modern. In 2015, after collaborating with the Rencontres d’Arles festival, she published Duane Michals, Storyteller (Filigranes) right before relocating to the U.S. She has since written for various art magazines including Aperture and FOAM and curated solo exhibitions of Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Saya Woolfalk, as well as the group exhibition, “Confinement. Politics of Space and Bodies” at The Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Cincinnati. In 2018, she co-curated the LagosPhoto Festival, and in 2019 she was in charge of the co-curation of the 2020 FotoFocus biennial and of Layers, a survey of modern and contemporary Nigerian art, with Iheanyi Onwuegbucha.
1 The House Is Black captures life in the Iranian Baba Baghi leper colony.
2 The Masses, the Patriots, and the Villains (AN).
3 Turbulent won a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999. It was also Neshat’s first venture into the world of film.
4 Shoja Azari, an Iranian filmmaker, and Neshat’s husband.
5 Sussan Deyhim, an Iranian composer and vocalist.
6 An Egyptian photographer, Nabil creates photographic tableaux recalling film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema. He photographed Neshat in 2004.
7 Anohni is more commonly known under the name of her band, Antony and the Johnsons.
I Will Greet the Sun Again
Shirin Neshat in conversation with Valentine Umansky
Shirin Neshat and Valentine Umansky discuss Iranian poetry, North-American politics and immigration, power dynamics within the cinema industry, and the many women they admire, including film director Forugh Farrokhzad and singer Umm Kulthum.
Shirin Neshat, Land of Dreams, 2019. Video still. Double-channel video/audio installation. HD video monochrome. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
Valentine Umansky: It all starts with your retrospective at the Broad in Los Angeles. It was the last exhibition I saw before the pandemic, in February 2020. I was then scheduled to take a trip to the UK and ended up stranded in Europe, as Donald J. Trump closed the international borders!
Shirin Neshat: Oh yes, you were based in Ohio at the time.
VU: Yes, and despite being a visa holder, I was never able to return. No matter in what context you immigrate to the US, it’s always a nightmare.
SN: It got worse over the last few years, don’t you think?
VU: With the last presidency, I would say.
SN: So, what happened? You stayed and got another job in the UK?
VU: Basically. At least I got to see your retrospective before I left!
SN: How shall we begin our conversation?
VU: Well, I have a ritual for those. Do you have a piece of paper and a pen?
SN: I do.
VU: May I ask you to write down, without speaking them out loud, two lines of a poem or song lyrics that are dear to you.
SN: In Farsi or in English? [laughs]
VU: Whatever you prefer, it doesn’t have to be English.
SN: Done!
VU: All right. I’ll ask you about it later but it’s a nice way to start, I think.
SN: There is poetry I’ve used over and over in my work, which I can write with my eyes closed.
VU: We can begin with this actually, since poetry is omnipresent in your work. How would you define your relationship with literature?
SN: Well, I grew up in Iran. Iranians are known for their interest in ancient, modern, and contemporary literature. My own father would recite poetry at home, sometimes to make a point. I remember that in high school, in our small town, we were reading complex Western existentialist writers.
In some ways, I consider myself a poet too. I’m drawn to poetry for its allegorical, symbolic values. Through the use of metaphors, we can be subversive without breaking the rules. Let’s not forget that I grew up under a dictatorship; censorship was a way of life. Iranians have learnt to be imaginative in how they express and perceive art, through enigma and symbolism.
IN SOME WAYS, I CONSIDER MYSELF A POET TOO. I’M DRAWN TO POETRY FOR ITS ALLEGORICAL, SYMBOLIC VALUES. THROUGH THE USE OF METAPHORS, WE CAN BE SUBVERSIVE WITHOUT BREAKING THE RULES. LET’S NOT FORGET THAT I GREW UP UNDER A DICTATORSHIP; CENSORSHIP WAS A WAY OF LIFE. IRANIANS HAVE LEARNT TO BE IMAGINATIVE IN HOW THEY EXPRESS AND PERCEIVE ART, THROUGH ENIGMA AND SYMBOLISM.
In 2009, I adapted Shahrnush Parsipur’s magic realist novel Women Without Men (1990) into a movie. It’s a beautiful story, written by an Iranian woman. Other than her, the one poet I really fell in love with was Forugh Farrokhzad, who died at the age of thirty-two. Her work is essential to Iranian modern literature. Although she passed in the 1960s, way before the revolution, she tackled issues of religion, sexuality, feminism, and politics with such a sense of clarity and rebelliousness. In the most timeless and universal manner.
VU: She also shot an incredible film . . .
SN: The House Is Black (1962), yes. I often think about what Forugh represents to us Iranian women: her beauty, her vulnerability, her painful relationship to men, to motherhood. Her isolation in the Iranian society. And despite all this, the majestic legacy she left behind. I must admit I’m drawn to iconic women artists, poets, writers, and singers who have made contributions to culture while living challenging lives.
VU: At the start of the first lockdown, I initiated a film exchange with a friend, filmmaker Michelange Quay. Well, Farrokhzad’s is one of the first I shared.
SN: You screened The House Is Black?
VU: Yes. It was an interesting perspective to embrace in the early time of lockdown, as a way to reflect on what confinement means politically.
SN: An effortlessly beautiful film, which shows how one can find grace in the horror of a disease.1 Something I like about both Forugh and Shahrnush Parsipur is that they can’t be bound within the Iranian society. Their language transcends beyond the specificities of their culture.
VU: That’s also the case for Nizami Ganjavi, whom you refer to in one of your works.
SN: Yes. I wasn’t as familiar with his poetry but Ganjavi is Persian. Some consider him Iranian, some Azeri. When I started the series The Home of My Eyes (2015), I thought it would be interesting to inscribe some of his poetry on the portraits I took there.
Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence, 1994. From Women of Allah series. Ink on LE silver gelatin print. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
VU: That’s a good segue into your relationship with literature and calligraphy.
SN: The nature of my photographic practice changed over time. Initially, I was taking self-portraits, but that ended with Book of Kings in 2012. The series is comprised of sixty portraits divided into three groups.2 It develops an allegorical narrative about the 2009 Green Movement in Iran, the Arab Spring, and the contagious revolutionary uprisings that spread across the entire Arab world. The series focused on notions of patriotism, devotion, and self-sacrifice, giving space to this youth who fought for democracy but was consequently confronted with systematic brutality, arrests, and torture.
The following year, with Our House Is on Fire, my photographic work took a new turn, and got closer to the documentary. I no longer photographed friends but sought people out. I traveled to Egypt, meeting and photographing people. With the help of friends and translators, I interviewed elderly, poor, religious people, mainly from the Muslim Brotherhood community, who had suffered a great deal during the Egyptian revolution. They shared their stories and experiences as they shed tears.
It’s in 2014 that I got invited to work in Azerbaijan, a country known for its multiethnicity. In this country, which shares borders with Iran, and where my mother’s roots come from, I interviewed Azeris from various ethnic origins: Armenians, Russians, and Turks. I asked what “home” meant to them and incorporated the responses in Farsi on their bodies. This theme was particularly poignant for someone like me, to whom the idea of “home” remains an unresolved, emotional issue.
The latest work, Land of Dreams (2020), frames my perspective about the United States, where I have lived longer than in my country of birth, a country I cherish but can be critical of. I chose to film and take photographs in the Southwest, partly because New Mexico feels similar to the sublime landscapes of Iran. I went from place to place, visiting communities from various ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds, including Native Americans, African Americans, Latin American migrants, and Angelinos. The purpose was to talk about their experiences as native or naturalized Americans during the post-Trump era, a time of blatant white supremacy, rising conservatism, racism, and anti-immigrant policies. It was there in the Southwest that I bonded with individuals who, like me, were holding onto that idea of the United States as a “land of dreams,” despite their anxiety about the future.
Shirin Neshat, Land of Dreams, 2019. Video still. Double-channel video/audio installation. HD video monochrome. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
VU: Your choice of titles often strikes me. Land of Dreams, for example, functions on a reversal of “dreamland,” an expression often used by foreigners aspiring to emigrate to the United States. I also think of scenes seen through the perspectives of two different groups, for example. Perspective reversals seem to recur in your work. I wondered if you could elaborate on this a bit.
SN: I was thinking about it yesterday, how everything I’ve done, from the photographic series Women of Allah (1997) to the feature film Women Without Men (2009), revolves around duality. An obvious explanation would be that I am a person of exile, a true expression of hybridity. I’m Iranian but not fully Iranian, American but not entirely American. I’m always something in between, never quite a fit, and my work seems to have embraced this form of contradiction.
Land of Dreams opens onto this monumental, Southwest desert, which is paired with a claustrophobic industrial space: the colony. It’s a man-made, authoritarian, and oppressive environment, which looks like a nuclear facility and evokes ex-Soviet bureaucratic offices. In it, men and women are dressed in white lab coats, and are busy receiving, processing, and analyzing American citizens’ portraits and dreams. The colony acts as a political satire of the Iranian government’s absurdities and perpetual anti-American rhetoric. Once outside the colony, the viewer is faced with a vast, natural landscape, which borders an American town, in which citizens reveal their anxieties about displacement, abandonment, and loss.
VU: Since you mention them, I was going to ask, do your dreams look like your films?
SN: Roja (2016) is a shot-by-shot manifestation of one of my dreams. In recent years, most of my dreams have featured my mother, who lives in Iran. Roja portrays an Iranian woman in a Western context, who is looking far to the East. Suddenly she sees her mother appear in the distance. As she runs toward her mother, she discovers that her mother has turned into a monster, who soon pushes her away. I’ve always interpreted this dream as the fear of losing my now-elderly mother, and how that loss could be the final breaking point between my motherland and myself.
VU: The museum version of Land of Dreams also felt strongly autobiographical. I remember thinking about the main character, an art student on an assignment to photograph U.S. citizens and ask about their dreams, “oh, but this is Shirin.”
SN: She is my alter ego, in a way. In fact, if you study my recent video work, Roja, Sarah (2016), Illusions and Mirrors (2013), and now Land of Dreams, the female protagonists all have similar physiques (small, with large eyes) and are dressed in black. Intuitively I have created projections of myself. It’s interesting to see how I started with self-portraits and now I have my muses playing me.
Changing the subject a bit, I wanted to ask for your opinion about the presentation of Land of Dreams. At the Broad, I exhibited the two videos in different rooms so the viewer had to watch each separately. But there were new restrictions due to COVID-19 when I prepared the work for my exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in New York. As the gallery could not build two dark rooms, I decided to edit a composite version of the videos so they could be shown simultaneously, side by side, in an open space. Later, I realized that this presentation fitted the meaning of the piece better. Notions of dualities were made apparent: natural landscape versus claustrophobic industrial space, dream versus reality, Iranian versus North-American culture. Unexpected coincidences also started to appear, which was quite magical, as when the judge is talking about an old immigrant lady on one screen, and she appears in her bed on the other. You saw both versions so . . . what did you think?
Shirin Neshat, Rapture series, 1999. Gelatin silver print. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; and Noirmontartproduction, Paris
VU: Although they are incredible standalone pieces, I feel like I understood the work better seeing the videos side by side. I noticed characters looping in and out of each screen but, more importantly, the composite made obvious the carefully controlled timing of each. This binary structure reminded me of your 1999 piece, Rapture, which oscillates between groups of women and men. When in a museum, it was installed on two facing screens, which forced viewers to turn around to see first the men, then again for the women’s answer, in a call-and-response kind of way. As viewers, we were immersed, orchestrating the dialogue.
SN: In many ways, the audience becomes the editor. For Turbulent (1998), it was different.3 You had the male character, Shoja,4 and the female, Sussan,5 taking turns. With Rapture, I made it so that there were moments of simultaneous activity and then pauses, men looking at the women, and vice versa, until they both became active again.
Thinking back to this idea of opposites, Soliloquy (1999), which by the way is the only video I ever performed in, has certain parallels with Land of Dreams. It is a double channel projection, one taking place in the West (filmed in Albany and New York City) and the other shot in the East (Mardin, Turkey.) In Land of Dreams, the main character navigates between Iranian and North-American landscapes and, like my character in Soliloquy, Simin is always wearing black.
VU: I wanted to ask you about this constant.
SN: Think about Turbulent, my first video: the woman wears black, while the man is in a white shirt. Then comes Rapture, same thing. In Passage (2002), the film I made with Philip Glass, all men are black silhouettes, carrying a body across the desert. Roja, Sarah, Illusions and Mirrors, all women in black. That way all characters transform into silhouettes.
VU: I was thinking about Illusions and Mirrors actually, in which Natalie Portman is dressed in black as well. Aside from the color, it’s her rather flowy silhouette that struck me. Her skirt is literally like a veil.
SN: A ghost.
VU: Exactly. My guess was that the black and white allowed for your characters to become interchangeable. It makes the silhouettes atemporal, which connects with what we talked about, the universality of the themes you choose. As much as you’re talking about the Iranian revolution, it could also refer to Egypt.
SN: I care about simplicity but also like the characters to never blend in, to stand out like a silhouette. I almost always photograph people in black clothes, so as to not be distracted by color or design. That way, we can focus on facial expressions.
VU: Is that why the museum version of Land of Dreams is in black and white?
SN: There is a severity to black and white that I like. It emphasizes duality. Even landscapes look better; they are less believable . . . how can I say?
VU: Abstract.
SN: Yes. By losing color, you lift some of the realism of your concepts or narratives. We really thought about this factor for the feature version of Land of Dreams but, in the end, we chose color.
VU: I find that connection to timelessness distinctive. In Land of Dreams, we are invited to meander through a surrealist dream. The only moment that brings us back to reality is when we see Arabic written on the spine of folders, on the colony’s bookshelf. The calligraphy calls back reality.
SN: Interesting. Land of Dreams seems to provoke different interpretations from the viewers. With the composite version, it is even more complex because the audience has to constantly figure out the relationships between the two screens. If, for example, one chooses to focus on one screen for long, chances are that they will lose the thread in the narrative.
Shirin Neshat, Looking For Oum Kulthum, 2017. Film still. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of the artist and Razor Film.
VU: I also wanted to ask you about the choice of color in Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017).
SN: Well, that could not have been shot in black and white. It is a period film, paying tribute to Umm Kulthum who lived during the time of Technicolor. The film references those Egyptian posters of icons—the divas of the time, who were so lush, important, and full of exaggerated colors. Think of Youssef Nabil’s work.6 It’s this era. Umm Kulthum was a fashionable woman, I didn’t want to take that away. The film also had to be faithful to aspects of Egyptian history, at a time when the country was fully cosmopolitan. Egyptians would have never forgiven me for turning it into a black and white video piece.
VU: It’s interesting. You just said: “Egyptians would have never forgiven me.” That’s exactly what the director says in the film!
SN: Yes, the film speaks about being apologetic and nervous while sharing the perspective of a non-Egyptian daring to make work about the biggest Egyptian icon of all time. The filmmaker is transparent about the film’s flaws, and her refusal to turn her subject into a hero. The film was an experiment, a film inside a film, and an artist’s reflection about another artist. Meanwhile, Egyptians expected a biopic, and I was not interested in that. Looking back, I’m proud of it because it genuinely makes a point about the impossibility of satisfying everyone.
VU: It also clearly talks about power dynamics in the cinema industry. We see producers backing out, tension increasing between the director and one actor, and conversely, the affection that develops between the lead actress and the director. Her fragility is perceptible until that moment when she steps out of the power play and says, “It’s okay, it doesn’t have to be perfect.”
SN: It took a lot of courage to shoot this film and I’m happy to have invested in it, not only as a tribute to the legendary Umm Kulthum, but also to raise important questions about what it takes to be an artist, and particularly a woman artist.
VU: I appreciated how the film shows three stages in a woman’s life: the young actor, the established director, and the older Umm Kulthum. Quite the opposite of the timelessness we were discussing earlier. In a way, that’s a film you couldn’t have made earlier in your career.
SN: You’re absolutely right, and I’m not sure why I felt such pressure to make this film since it was outside of my cultural, thematic aims, but I learnt a lot. Moving in between the cross section of visual arts and cinema was special. It is not unique to me, many artists including Steve McQueen and Matthew Barney have tried that, but I believe we all found our own balance.
VU: I think the way you operate, between video art and features, is similar to your practice that merges photography and calligraphy. Maybe it’s trickier to live in between, but isn’t it also the very challenge you enjoy?
SN: Working between mediums I’m not trained in at all! [laughs] You’re right, and to be honest my daily practice at the studio is a bit schizophrenic. On any given day, I’m dealing with curators, museums, gallery owners, producers, actors, film festival directors, et cetera. There’s something exhilarating and challenging in managing different practices but it keeps me on my toes. Right now, I’m interviewing composers for my new film, and, as they have no idea who I am and I know little about them, it feels a bit like a blind date!
Shirin Neshat, Turbulent, 1998. Video still. Two-channel video/audio installation. 16mm black-and-white film transferred to video. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
VU: You brought up composers, so let me ask you about sound. In Roja, which opens with Anohni singing,7 there is a scene that heavily relies on voiceover. You also mentioned composer Philip Glass earlier in our conversation. I was wondering how the sonic dimension is incorporated in your work?
SN: My whole musical experience started with Turbulent, which marked the start of a collaboration with the singer and composer Sussan Deyhim. I later worked with Ryūichi Sakamoto and Philip Glass, who were far more minimal and gave me a new perspective about the value of music on film.
VU: Less is more.
SN: I went far more minimal. With Sarah, Roja, and Illusions and Mirrors, we had very little music, mainly sound design. With Land of Dreams, we have only one melody, the beautiful sound of the setar, a Persian instrument, composed and played by Iranian singer-composer Mohsen Namjoo.
VU: It seems like you had three phases. There was the first one with Sussan Deyhim then minimal moments with Glass.
SN: Sonically, it has been an evolution. [laughs]
VU: Now, what phase would you say you’ve reached?
SN: I appreciate silence far more than I used to. When you hear continuous music, you become neutral to it. I learned that from Women Without Men, in which we maintained a lot of silence. Once Ryūichi Sakamoto’s sweeping music came in, it felt like a reward.
VU: You mention those silences but, in Women Without Men, the radio is extremely present. The main character is obsessed with the news, which made me reflect on radio as a commonality. When there is a coup d’etat, it’s always through the radio that the announcement is made. That’s also the case in your film: the army takes over the broadcasting company. Sound can make manifest this imposition of a new power structure.
SN: One of my early videos, Pulse (2001), tells the story of a woman whose entire relationship to the outside world is through the radio. She never leaves her home. We see her murmuring a love song she listens to on the radio. The whole scene has a very sensual, almost erotic, tone because of how she interacts with the singer’s voice. I found radios to be very powerful . . . but these days, it’s all on the computer. [laughs]
VU: I hear you! Maybe now it’s time for me to ask: What did you write on that paper earlier, Shirin?
SN: Guess what, it’s a poem by Forugh Farrokhzad!
VU: Of course. [laughs]
SN: It was also the title of my exhibition at the Broad. It reads:
به آفتاب سلامی دوباره خواهم داد
I Will Greet the Sun Again.
VU: Perfect way to end.
Shirin Neshat, Artist
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born visual artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat works with the mediums of photography, video and film, through which she creates complex human narratives addressing the universal themes of gender, displacement, oppression, and identity.
Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and museums worldwide and has been the recipient of the Golden Lion Award – the First International Prize at the 48th Venice Biennial (1999), the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival (2009), The Crystal Award (2014), and the Premium Imperiale (2017), amongst others.
Valentine Umansky, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern, London
As a curator, author and critic, Valentine Umansky has worked for various institutions dedicated to visual arts and is currently acting as Curator, International Art at Tate Modern. In 2015, after collaborating with the Rencontres d’Arles festival, she published Duane Michals, Storyteller (Filigranes) right before relocating to the U.S. She has since written for various art magazines including Aperture and FOAM and curated solo exhibitions of Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Saya Woolfalk, as well as the group exhibition, “Confinement. Politics of Space and Bodies” at The Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Cincinnati. In 2018, she co-curated the LagosPhoto Festival, and in 2019 she was in charge of the co-curation of the 2020 FotoFocus biennial and of Layers, a survey of modern and contemporary Nigerian art, with Iheanyi Onwuegbucha.
1 The House Is Black captures life in the Iranian Baba Baghi leper colony.
2 The Masses, the Patriots, and the Villains (AN).
3 Turbulent won a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999. It was also Neshat’s first venture into the world of film.
4 Shoja Azari, an Iranian filmmaker, and Neshat’s husband.
5 Sussan Deyhim, an Iranian composer and vocalist.
6 An Egyptian photographer, Nabil creates photographic tableaux recalling film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema. He photographed Neshat in 2004.
7 Anohni is more commonly known under the name of her band, Antony and the Johnsons.