Shirin Neshat: Bridging the Gaps Between Femininity, Islam, the West, and More - Essay Sample

Introduction

Born in 1957 in Qazvin, Iran, Shirin Neshat is a visual artist who has been living in New York since the early 1990s (Basiri 50). Neshat is widely known for her artwork that centers on femininity and masculinity, Islam and the West, modernity, and antiquity, and public and private lives. Her works try to bridge the gaps between the aforementioned themes. Neshat's works have earned recognition at the national and international ranks. For example, in 1999, she won the XLVIII Venice Biennale International Award, and ten years later, in 2009, she won the best director Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival (Basiri 50). Roger Denson, a critic of the Huffington Post, named Neshat, is the artist of the decade. This short essay demonstrates some of these fantastic works by Shirin Neshat, majorly her series, Women of Allah.

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Photographs were Neshat's earliest works. They included the Unveiling of 1993, followed by a 1993 to 1997 series Women of Allah (Tsai 108). These works of art explored femininity in the field of militancy and Islamic fundamentalism in Iran, the home country of Shirin Neshat. In an effort to cope with the difference between the culture of the revolutionized Iran and that culture which she was raised in, the pre-revolution Iran, she produced the series Women of Allah. It was her first mature work that portrayed how the Persian Calligraphy entirely overlaid women (Basiri 52). Women of Allah featured women who, during the Iran-Iraq war, were symbols of both liberation and submission. Neshat's work did not end at the visual impact; she also accompanied the images with poets and calligraphic poems that depicted feminine fulfillment.

Women of Allah explores the complexities of identities that are tagged on women amid a changing cultural arena in the Middle East. She represents the views given to Muslim women through the Western eyes, and through the religious conviction and the personalities of the subjects. In her black chador, the symmetrical split made the weapon implies a psychic fragmentation or a violent rupture. The artwork suggests a clear line of contradictions on subjects such as modernity and tradition, beauty and violence, and between the East and the West (Zeina 143). In the work, Neshat describes the gazing of the woman as submissive, representing a paradoxical reality that behind the surface is more complicated.

The Islamic revolution in Iran brought about some visible cultural changes, including the mandatory requirement for women to put on the veil in public. To many Muslim women, the practice is empowering and identifies them with their religion. However, in the eyes of Westerners, the veil is a symbol of the oppression of women by Islam. The opposition to this evident during the movements for women liberation of women in the United States and Europe in the 1970s (Shabani n.p). Shirin Neshat explored this fraught symbol in her artwork as a way to reconcile her feelings that was riddled with conflict. In her series Women of Allah, the veil represents both freedom and repression.

On the surface, the veil protects the bodies of women against the male gaze. The male gaze turns women into sexualized objects. The veil also extends to cover the women from being seen at all. According to Neshat, the male gaze in western culture. In film and advertising, the bodies of women are used as objects of desire. They are paraded for viewing without any consequences. In her art, Neshat uses 'gazing back' as a symbol of freeing women from objectification. The Orientalist painting, for example, depicts Eastern women as nude, and among other beautiful objects of possession (Tsai 108). A gazing back response by Neshat symbolizes the breaking free of women from male desire and subservience. This gaze in her artwork might also represent the exotic fantasies of the people of the East.

Most of the photographs in the series Women of Allah show the subjects holding a gun. The muzzle of the gun would, on some occasions, be threateningly pointing directly into the camera lens. Also, sometimes the subjects appear passively holding the guns, but with a silent rebellion. With varied ideas of the 'gaze', there also comes a double meaning for 'shoot', and more particularly because the camera was also a symbol of oppression against women in the colonial era (Zeina 162). During this time, the camera was used to disregard women's bodies. Apart from the apparent representation of the gun of control, it also depicts religious martyrdom. In the subject of martyrdom, Neshat feels like she is an outcast to the culture of the Iranian revolution.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Shirin Neshat is a vocal artist who uses her artwork to pass messages on varied themes including the portrayal of masculinity and feminism in Islam, East, and the West, modernity, and antiquity, and public and private lives. Her pieces of amply describe the Muslim woman as a figure other than what is envisioned by the rest of the world. Neshat is an outspoken artist and feminist who is bold enough to challenge the suppression of women's voices in the community.

Works Cited

Basiri, Nasim. "Compulsory Veil In Iran: A Social Justice Problem." Revista Universitara De Sociologie 14.1 (2018): 50-58.

Bokharachi, Elnaz. Displacement, Belonging, Photography: Gender and Iranian Identity in Shirin Neshat's The Women of Allah (1993-7) and The Book of Kings (2012). Diss. Arizona State University, 2015.

Shabani, Sima. Contemporary Iranian women artists: a virtual exhibition and catalog. Diss. Rutgers University-Camden Graduate School, 2017.

Tsai, Sylvia. "Shirin Neshat: The home of my eyes." ArtAsiaPacific 94 (2015): 108.

Zeina, Esmaeil. "Visual Discourses of (Un) veiling: Revisiting Women of Allah." Seen and Unseen: Visual Cultures of Imperialism. Brill, 2017. 143-171.