Artist Shirin Neshat discusses her work with celebrated curator, art historian, and critic Lucy R. Lippard at SITE Santa Fe.
Shirin Neshat (b. 1957 Qazvin, Iran) is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Her photographs and video installations are highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives which question issues of power, religion, race, gender, and relationships between past and present, occident and orient, individual and collective through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian living in exile. Neshat’s early photographic works include the Women of Allah series (1993–1997), which explored the question of gender in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy. Her subsequent video works departed from overtly political content or critique in favor of more poetic imagery and complex human narratives. Neshat continues to explore and experiment with the mediums of photography, video, and film. Her most recent bodies of work include the photographic series Land of Dreams (2019), The Home of My Eyes (2015) and the trilogy Dreamers comprised of three video installations: Illusions and Mirrors (2013), Roja and Sarah (2016).
Neshat has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017,) and most recently Land of Dreams which premiered at the Venice Film Festival (2021.)
Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2022); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2021); The Broad, Los Angeles (2020); Museo Correr, Venice, Italy (2017); Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (2015); Detroit Institute of Arts (2013); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2006); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2005); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2000); and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal(2001).
Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006). In 2017, she received the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award in Tokyo
Neshat directed her first opera Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg Festival In 2017, which will be restaged in 2022.
She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in London.
Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, sometime curator, author of 25 books on contemporary art and cultural criticism, including From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, Eva Hesse, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, and most recently Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West, and Pueblo Chico: Land and lives in Galisteo Since 1814. She has co-founded various artists’ feminist and activist organizations and publications. She lives off the grid in rural Galisteo, New Mexico, where for 26 years she has edited the monthly community newsletter: El Puente de Galisteo.
