Filmmaker Feature: Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat, is a New York-based, Iranian born film-maker who explores themes of gender, identity and politics in Iran and the United States. Through her work, Neshat confronts the dark sides of her inheritance, and brings to life an absurd and distorted representation of a homeland that her unconscious has created.
By Sophia Quinn
Our dreams “reflect what we are running from”, in her work Shirin Neshat attempts to “run after them”.
Just as dreams become a kind of transformation of memories or things we do not confront; Neshat’s work shows how our inheritance can become a form of haunting if not addressed.
Born in Qazvin, Iran in 1957 to “a very warm, supportive Muslim family”, Neshat was encouraged “to take risks, to learn [and] to see the world”. She eventually immigrated to the United States where she completed a Masters in Fine Arts at Berkeley. After many years in the States, she returned to visit Iran following the revolution and experienced an extreme cultural shock at its new social and political climate.
Shirin’s photography and video create a visual narrative of her own complex history between the two nations. One of her earlier photography series, Women of Allah (1993-1997), takes on conceptions of women’s identities in the new Iran, “both through the lens of Western representations of Muslim women, and through the more intimate subject of personal and religious conviction”.
Her photographs address the silencing of women inherent to politics of policing women’s bodies and attempt to reconcile her relationship with the Iran she inherited and what it has become today.
The 2016 film Roja is an immigration story that tells of Shirin’s transition of identity; in flight between two cultures, two nations and two identities. In the film, the main character, encounters a mother-figure, which appears as a manifestation of Shirin’s last connection to her Iranian inheritance that continues to visit her in dreams. Shirin says: “the mother who is supposed to be a protective and loving figure ends up being a monster” that speaks to her desire for a reunion with ‘home’ with ‘mother,’ with the ‘motherland’ that seems welcoming at first but becomes terrifying and demonic in the end.
Roja intimately captures Shirin’s link to her inheritance and “the often-unresolvable condition of exile” that she brings into the visual field. Neshat’s work has “a desperate nostalgia and love for Iran and wants to be a part of it, but at the same time it is pushing [her] away…the only thing that remains for [her] in a homeland is the motherland”. Playing between ideas of nationhood that are welcoming and warm for immigrants and also aspects that are frightening and alienating, Shirin captures in Roja the complexities of inheritance and immigration.
Using glass over the camera to blur and distort the images is a technique Neshat uses to “transition between reality and dream or reality and memory”. Only 17 minutes in length, the Roja is a political and psychological journey of the individual in a dream-like landscape that mixes tropes of her inheritance with the new American culture in which she is assimilating herself. In her film, Neshat takes on her complicated relationship with her inheritance and unsettled relationship with her homeland. The film fantastically represents the strange beauty and magic of dreams and Manifest the multitude of ways our inheritance informs our identities.
