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Sunday 16 February

Shirin Neshat: The Poetics of Resistance

Published on: 1 January 2025

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 6 minutes

There are certain artists who pass through the ages like comets, leaving behind a luminous trail that enlightens our understanding of the world. Shirin Neshat is one of them. She offers us a body of work that shakes our perception of the contemporary Muslim world.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: There are certain artists who pass through the ages like comets, leaving behind a luminous trail that enlightens our understanding of the world. Shirin Neshat (born in 1957) is one of them. At a time when some still confuse a Rothko with the paint job of a model apartment, allow me to introduce you to an artist who has turned photography and video into weapons of mass construction.

Here is a woman who left Iran at the age of 17 to study in California, only to return 16 years later, in 1990, to discover a country transformed by the Islamic Revolution. This cultural shock could have paralyzed her. Instead, it propelled her into an uncompromising artistic exploration of the paradoxes of identity, power, and resistance. While some still marvel at digitally generated still lifes by AI, Neshat delivers a body of work that shakes the very foundations of our perception of the contemporary Muslim world.

Let’s first talk about her masterful handling of duality, that perpetual tension between East and West that runs through her work like a spine. In Turbulent (1998) and Rapture (1999), Neshat uses video projections on two opposing screens, creating a visual dialogue reminiscent of Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave. On one side, men in white shirts, prisoners of their rituals in an austere fortress. On the other, women in black chadors, free in their apparent captivity. Sartre reminds us that “hell is other people”, but in Neshat’s work, hell becomes a space of identity negotiation where gazes cross without ever truly meeting.

The sophistication of her approach makes those interactive digital installations where you flail your arms in front of a screen like a penguin on acid seem ridiculous. Neshat understands that true art doesn’t need technological gimmicks to punch you in the gut. She uses the minimalism of black-and-white imagery the way Rothko used his color rectangles: to create a space for contemplation that becomes a near-mystical experience.

Her Women of Allah series (1993-1997) represents the second pillar of her artistic genius. These black-and-white photographs, where the female body becomes a page inscribed with Persian poetry, possess an evocative power that makes today’s “engaged” selfies look like kindergarten doodles. Neshat transforms calligraphy into a cartography of the soul, each word traced on the skin becoming an act of poetic resistance. This approach echoes Derrida’s concept of “différance”, where meaning is constructed in the gap between the signifier and the signified, between image and text, between body and mind.

The guns that appear in these images are not mere provocative props, contrary to what some shallow critics who’ve never read beyond Art for Dummies might think. These weapons are metaphors for a deeper struggle—the individual against the structures of power that seek to define them. Foucault would have appreciated this perfect illustration of his theory of biopower, where the body becomes the battleground for social and political forces.

In Logic of the Birds (2001), Neshat pushes her exploration of feminine resistance further, inspired by the mystical poem of Farid ud-Din Attar. The multimedia performance she creates is as far removed from shopping mall sound-and-light shows as the Mona Lisa is from a smiling emoji. She weaves a complex tapestry of sounds, images, and movements that evokes spiritual quests while questioning contemporary power structures.

What sets Neshat apart from artists who merely ride the wave of politically correct art is her ability to transcend mere social commentary to reach a universal dimension. Her works are not visual pamphlets but profound meditations on the human condition. When she films women walking toward the sea in Rapture, she’s not simply documenting female oppression—she’s crafting an allegory of freedom that resonates with Plato’s cave.

Her use of music in her video installations is particularly remarkable. Philip Glass’s composition for Passage (2001) is not just a background score like your Sunday morning Spotify playlist. It’s an integral part of the work, creating what Wagner called the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. The soundtrack becomes a character in its own right, dialoguing with the images in a visual and auditory symphony that grabs you by the guts.

If you still think contemporary art is all about bananas taped to walls or NFTs of apes, it’s time to wake up. Neshat shows us what art can be when driven by an authentic vision and impeccable technical mastery. Her work is living proof that contemporary art can be both intellectually stimulating and viscerally powerful.

In The Home of My Eyes (2015), Neshat photographs Azerbaijanis of all ages and origins, their faces covered with calligraphic texts narrating their personal stories. This work is not merely a series of portraits—it’s a philosophical exploration of collective identity echoing Benedict Anderson’s theories of “imagined communities”. Each face becomes a testimony where the traces of personal and collective history are inscribed.

Neshat creates works that function on multiple levels. At first glance, you are struck by the formal beauty of her images. Then, like a Bach fugue, layers of meaning gradually reveal themselves, creating an experience that deepens with each viewing. This is what Walter Benjamin called the “aura” of the artwork, that ineffable quality that makes it unique and irreplaceable.

Her installation Women Without Men (2009), based on the novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, is a tour de force that transforms the cinematic medium into a tool of philosophical exploration. Following four women in 1950s Iran, Neshat creates a political allegory echoing Hannah Arendt’s theories on totalitarianism and resistance. The garden where the protagonists find refuge becomes a Foucauldian heterotopia, an “other space” where the normal rules of society are suspended.

The political dimension of her work cannot be ignored, but it transcends simple visual activism. Unlike those artists who think slapping a slogan on a canvas is enough for politically engaged art, Neshat understands that true subversion lies in complexity. Her works don’t offer easy answers but pose questions that linger long after viewing.

Her use of the body as a site of resistance and cultural inscription recalls Judith Butler’s theories on gender performativity, while enriching them with a spiritual dimension often missing in Western discourse on identity. Neshat’s women are not merely victims or rebels—they are carriers of an ancestral wisdom that defies simplistic categorizations.

In her most recent works, like The Fury (2022), Neshat continues to explore the themes that have always haunted her, but with renewed urgency. Dance becomes a political act of resistance, the moving body defying social constraints with a grace reminiscent of Rumi’s whirling dervishes. This is art that grabs you by the guts while nourishing your mind.

Neshat reminds us that true artistic creation is an act of courage requiring total commitment. Her work is a testament to the possibility of creating art that is both deeply personal and universally meaningful, politically engaged and poetically transcendent.

If you were to take away just one thing from her work, it’s her ability to transform the specificity of her experience into a universal reflection on the human condition. Like Kafka turning his Prague Jewishness into universal literature, Neshat transmutes her experience as an Iranian exile into art that speaks to anyone who has ever felt the vertigo of the in-between, the tension between tradition and modernity, between belonging and alienation.

Neshat’s work remains a beacon of complexity and humanity. She reminds us that true art is not here to comfort us in our certainties but to make us see the world with new eyes.

Reference(s)

Shirin NESHAT (1957)
First name: Shirin
Last name: NESHAT
Gender: Female
Nationalitie(s):

  • Iran (Islamic Republic of)

Age: 68 years old (2025)

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