For Our Dyings: Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams

by Lisa Zeiger

“All I can see is the frame.”
–Robert Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past

The art of Shirin Neshat is the pure, clear pool at the heart of a Persian garden. On its surface play fountains of poetry and music, films and visions. In its depths reside all the sequestered emotion, alluring ritual, and ambivalent traditions of the artist’s native Iran. Long gone from another country, Neshat exalts its beauty in the photographs, video installations and feature films she has been making since the early 1990s. To paraphrase Henry James, she is someone on whom nothing is lost, least of all the lessons and losses of her own life, in particular the chasm of her exile from Iran.

Neshat came to America as a high school student in 1975, living first in Los Angeles, then attending U.C. Berkeley where she earned an MFA in 1983. In the wake of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Neshat would not revisit her country until 1991, returning twice more to visit her family, until, in 1994, she was detained and interrogated at the airport, mistaken by authorities for a political dissident with the same name. She has never returned.

In 1999 Neshat’s work came under attack in the Iranian press. Thus, her videos and features set in Iran have been filmed elsewhere, from a school auditorium on the Lower East Side to Essaouira in Morocco, a location Neshat chose because it was there that her great influence, Orson Welles, filmed Othello.