Shirin Neshat at the Hirshhorn
Along with its new curator, Stéphane Aquin, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum welcomes a new exhibition by artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.
Shirin Neshat: Facing History will run May 18—September 20, 2015 and “[…]is the first exhibition to place Neshat’s work in the context of the history of modern Iran, a significant influence in her work.” (Hirshhorn press release, March 2015)
Turbulent, 1998, production still, video/sound installation: black and white, 16 mm film transfered to laserdisc, duration: 10 min.
Interviewed by Meeka Walsh and Robert Enright for Border Crossings Issue 109, the artist discusses symbolisms of paradise and suffering, the spell-binding power of film and poetry, and the deep, open narratives that pull on her own history, expressing what can often be a tight line between universal and individual experience.
Read the full conversation here as the artist and the interviewer discuss the art of composing highly orchestrated sets to elicit these narratives, constructed by a “photographer who is actually making thousands of individual images and putting them together in kinetic form.” (BC Issue 109, page 33)
Forough Farrokhzad, an Iranian poet of noted interest to Neshat, has her film The House is Black reviewed in the same issue.
Women Without Men, 2009, screens Thursday, June 11 at 7pm at the Hirshhorn.
Women Without Men (woman knitting), 2004, C-print, 36 x 92 1/4”, framed, edition of 5 + 1 AP. All images courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.
