Shirin Neshat
- Born in 1957,
- Lives and works in New York (United States)
Shirin Neshat, an Iranian artist living in the United States, explores the status of women in contemporary Islam, often through the lens of her own experience of exile.
Having left Iran in 1974 to study art, Neshat was deeply affected by the impact of the 1979 revolution on women during a visit back to the country in 1990. She began with photographic series (Unveiling, 1993; Women of Allah, 1994) in which veiled women are covered with enigmatic texts in Farsi calligraphy.
In 1997, her work shifted towards film with Turbulent, a two-screen installation that earned her the International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999. She repeated this format in Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000). Since 2003, Neshat has been adapting Shahrnoush Parsipur’s censored novel Women Without Men, addressing social and sexual taboos through the intertwined stories of women.
