agglutinations.com

October 21, 2003

Interview with Shirin Neshat: Thoughts about Identity, Culture, and Media

by Nader Vossoughian

Q. How would you characterize your identity as an artist? Do you feel any affinity with Iranian artists or filmmakers living in Iran?

A. My work starts from a bi-cultural perspective. Even though the subject matter is an Iranian one, I really speak from the perspective of someone who is transcultural. My background is conceptual art, and my university studies were carried out in the United States at Berkeley. At the same time, I do share a few things in common with the Iranian cinema specifically – its poetic impulse and its minimal language. I think that particularly in the works of the director Abbas Kiarostami, we see someone working within boundaries, with a restricted palette. This is in part a reaction to Iran’s political situation, to its tight censorship laws, which ironically have made artists still more subversive, minimal, and poetic.

Q. Tell us something about your working methods.

A. A lot of planning goes into everything [I do], but initially when the idea is born, it is purely intuitive. I think a lot of times my projects emerge out of my subconscious. My subconscious has its own particular logic, which is not a normal logic. There is the subject matter that generates the idea, which is often political or existential, but then there is the personal level of the work, the intuitive dimension. This is very much in keeping with how I operate as a person. Part of me is analytical, and part of me is wild and just wants to resist every form of order.

Q. In an interview with Artkrush, you characterize the experience of seeing a film in the cinema as being more “passive” than in an art gallery. Could you elaborate on this?

A. I do find the experience of looking a film in a theater setting radically different from in a gallery space. In my own work, so many of the films are designed as installations of two opposite projections where the viewer must sit between the two screens. Here the viewer finds it impossible to look and follow the story simultaneously on both sides; therefore he or she must constantly shift his or her attention back and forth. In a way, the viewer becomes the editor of the film. The relationship of audience to film is heightened and the experience becomes unusually physical and emotional because of the scale of the projection in part, where the spectator literally feels like he or she is inside the picture; the music that surrounds the spectator and once again the actual design of the installation make the viewer a participant in the piece.

Q. Do you have any input in how your films are presented in an actual galley space? Do you have any preferences vis-à-vis the size of the space in which they are displayed or the kind of lighting that gets used?

A. The design of the installation comes very early on as I am editing the film. The actual size of the room comes later when I finally get to project the film. I usually prefer larger rooms so there is sufficient distance between the viewer and the projection; otherwise, the audience might feel too claustrophobic. It varies from piece to piece, though. There is no lighting involved here; we essentially have a very dark room, the walls are painted black. What of course becomes most critical is the quality of the equipment, meaning the video projector, DVD player, and speakers.

Q. Most of your films are set in very spare and desolate locations – deserts, vast oceans, etc. What is your motivation behind this? Can you see yourself shooting a film on a public street?

A. You are right. It looks like it has been a pattern of mine to film mostly in open landscapes or in interior spaces, except, however, in a very few occasions, as in my film Possessed, which we shot in the streets of Morocco in 2001. I cannot really explain exactly why this is the case for me, perhaps because the nature of my films are less concretely sociological and more metaphoric -- not so bounded to a particular time and place. Perhaps part of me thinks that once you enter the city landscape, you cannot escape the specificity of time and place, and the meaning of the work then risks becoming too literal.

Q. Have you observed differences in how your work has been received before and after September 11th?

A. Yes and no. It just so happened that around September 11th two important art magazines had my work on their cover, which was good or bad timing, depending on how you looked at it.



I received a lot of phone calls. Quite understandably, people felt violated by September 11th and wanted to blame Moslems for it. The media in particular was looking for simplistic answers to very difficult questions. The issues surrounding 9/11 were simply too complex to be captured in television sound-bites or newspaper bi-lines.

What I tried to do is to strike a balance between what I thought was wrong, the violence and the oppression, but note at the same time that 9/11 involved a very limited group of people, that it does not (and should not) reflect upon an entire nation. I am simply not accustomed to speaking about Islam in sweeping generalities, and I thought we as a society were doing ourselves a disservice by looking for shorthand answers.

Q. Have you tried to deal with September 11th and its political aftermath in your work?

A. Not really. Again, my work is never really made with the intention of being directly political. I don’t feel qualified to do so. It’s not my nature to make grand gestures, whether political or otherwise, as I often err on the side of being timid or unconfident. I often feel skeptical of my own assumptions.

Although much has been made of the political intentions behind projects like The Women of Allah, I must say that it was not originally conceived as such. It was an exercise that I did not plan to make for an audience. I saw it more as a means of initiating a conversation with myself about martyrdom. What are the philosophical ideas behind it? How can I communicate its essence, visually speaking? On the one hand, martyrdom has a religious and spiritual dimension; on the other hand, there are aspects of violence, hate, and obsessiveness to it. To me the most important thing is to explore the conflicting values embodied in a single person – or an entire society, for that matter.

I often will investigate issues through the medium of images; images never want to give answers; often, they only raise further questions.

Q. So it would probably be fair to say that your most recent project, The Last Word, was not necessarily about the woman’s role in Persian society.

A. You’re right indeed. In The Last Word, I felt that the interrogation was something universal, that it could take place anywhere to anyone. For me it was not so much a political trial; the interrogator in the film could have represented a judge or God or whomever.

Q. What are you working on at the moment?

A. I am making my first feature film, readapting a book by Shahrnoush Parsipour, called Women Without Men. She is of course a highly respected Iranian writer who is now living in exile in the United States. The film will be shot in Morocco, starting in Jan. 2004. I have been writing the script which is totally different from the way I normally work but I am very excited and looking forward to the experience. This film is being produced by a film producer and is being planned as a regular feature films for theater screening.

Shirin Neshat's most recent installation piece, Tooba, is on view through February 15, 2004 at the Asia Society in New York.