Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat – Art studies in the USA during the Iranian revolution

Shirin Neshat was born in Quazvin in Iran on 26 March 1957. The progressive attitude of her father - a reputable doctor – towards the status of women, meant she received a good education, initially at a Catholic boarding school, and then following her brothers to college. Her express wish to study art led her ultimately to the USA, during which the Iranian revolution and its leader Ayatollah Khomeini radically changed the existing balance of power. This entailed a drastic social decline for Neshat’s family, and a twelve-year separation from their daughter living in the free West. The artist graduated with a Bachelor, Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the University of California in Berkeley, after which she married the Korean Kyong Park in New York, for whose Organisation Storefront of Art and Architecture she worked. Together they had a son, Cyrus.

The return home was a culture shock

Shirin Neshat found it difficult for a long time in the USA: As an Iranian student, she was confronted with hostility, especially after the hostage-taking of American diplomats in Tehran. Her inner conflict was also reflected in her art. Only after Khomeini’s death in 1990 was she able to return to her native Iran. However, she also struggled in the Islamic republic; the relative freedom she experienced herself in her childhood and teenage years had given way to suffocating restraints. Even her mother and sisters now wore the niqab to avoid imminent persecution. For Shirin, this was the catalyst to intensively explore the theme of women and Islam in her art. The loss of freedom, family, and privilege as well as the contrast between her memories of the past and the present social situation, shaped her work. Her black and white series Women of Allah caused a sensation: She photographed women in floor-length chador robes with the few visible areas of skin artfully inscribed with lyrical verses in Farsi. 

Artistic debate with opposites

After the divorce from her first husband, Shirin Neshat found in Shoja Azari a companion with whom she could find the peace she had longed for. Stabilised, she dealt with the many contradictions that confronted her as a woman and a stranger in everyday life with a new strength and power. The Islamist terror attacks of 11th September 2001 and the resulting mistrust of the American population against migrants from the Muslim world were also reflected in Shirin Neshat’s work. For the artist, feminism does not mean imitation of men, but a courageous and conscious exercise of femininity. Shirin Neshat has received prizes and awards for her art, including the Director’s Prize at the 66th Venice Film Festival in 2009 for her film Women Without Men, and the Goethe-Medaille in 2019.

Shirin Neshat lives and works in New York.