Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet The Sun Again

at The Broad, Los Angeles (through February 16)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” — Edward Said

“To stay alive you must slay silence” –Simin Behbahani

Shirin Neshat’s dense and nearly overwhelming exhibition I Will Greet The Sun Again interrogates the very nature of reality, myth, perception and memory with her piercing portraits of women whose face, hands and feet are covered with intricate, decorative Farsi text; her haunting videos reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s mysterious starkness, and her later portraits, which compile faces of the exiled. Neshat’s compelling photographs (black and white) and mystical films (black and white as well as color) examine cultural norms surrounding the wearing of the veil, as seen through both the Western and Islamic gaze along with the cultural dislocation suffered by individuals in diaspora.

Born in 1957, Neshat grew up in the northern Iranian city of Qazuin, which was somewhat religious. In interviews, she notes the split that she experienced as a result of her more modern, liberal upbringing (allowed inside the house) and the religious behavior required outside the house. In the 1970’s, Neshat came to Los Angeles to live with her sister and attend high school, eventually…