MELISSA HO is a curator at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where she organized the exhibitions Salvatore Scarpitta- Traveler, Barbara Kruger- Belief+Doubt, and, with Evelyn Hankins, At The Hub of Things- New Views of the Collection. She has contributed to numerous publications, including Color Chart- Reinventing Color 1950 to Today and Barnett Newman. MAHNAZ AFKHAMI is currently the executive director of the Foundation for Iranian Studies, and was formerly Minister of Women's Affairs for Iran.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Accompanying an exhibit at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, this
catalogue frames Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat's work in
relation to the recent history of Iran and the Islamic world.
Neshat's work is both astutely politically engaged and insistently
attuned to emotional and impressionistic human experiences. A
series of photographic prints and video installations, for
instance, features a fictional character named Munis, a young woman
who strives for social justice, confronts oppression from an older
brother, commits suicide, and enters an otherworldly space of the
political undead. Several other works feature Persian text, pulled
from literary sources and inserted onto the hands, feet, and faces
of Neshat's melancholic photographic subjects. The catalogue
includes a number of essays celebrating Neshat in the context of
modern Iranian history, and in particular the realities of U.S.
influence and intervention in the country. In concert with the
evocative, striking images and Neshat's own contextualization of
her work, the catalogue provides not only an illuminating take on
an important video and photographic artist, but also a nuanced
understanding of Iran's recent political and cultural evolution.
(June) BOOKLIST
Born in Iran in 1957, Shirin Neshat came to the U.S. in 1975, and
here she has remained as oppression and war continue to roil her
homeland. As an artist in exile, Neshat has steeped herself in
Iran's history, literature, and political and social movements,
especially the activism of women, and created elegant, melancholy,
and dramatic photographs, videos, and films exploring the
underlying complexities of Iranian lives. In Women of Allah (1997),
Neshat portrays women in chador, lacing with exquisite Persian
calligraphy (poems and prose by Iranian women writers) the parts of
the body that remain uncovered. Neshat's galvanizing
black-and-white stills from her videos Turbulence, Rapture, and
Fervor depict the separation of the sexes and the loneliness of
displacement. In this superlative volume, Neshat's graceful,
dignified work is illuminated by cogent analysis and her own
resonant commentary.
-- Donna Seaman
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