Iran

Shadi Ghadirian

Unsaying Life Stories:

The Self-Representational Art of Shirin Neshat and Ghazel

Aphrodite Désirée Navab
The Journal Of Aesthetic Education-
The Journal of Aesthetic Education 41.2 (2007) 39-66

Shirin Neshat was born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1957. She left Iran in 1974 to study in Los Angeles, California. When the Islamic revolution in 1978-79 overtook Iran she was still in the United States. She did not return to Iran until 1990. During that time she obtained her bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts (1982) at the University of California, Berkeley. After a twelve-year absence from Iran, Neshat's first visit back since the revolution was at once a painful and an exhilarating experience. It produced "probably one of the most shocking experiences I have ever had," Neshat described in an interview with Lina Bertucci.⁶ She explained that "the difference between [End Page 43] what I had remembered from Iranian culture and what I was witnessing was enormous. The change was both frightening and exciting. I had never been in a country that was so ideologically based."⁷ But Neshat was born in that country and did not leave it until she was seventeen years old. This disruption, having been disconnected from the radical transformations that took place in Iran as a result of the Islamic revolution, made Neshat unable to recognize her homeland. It is this ambivalence, however, that is the dynamic that fuels her work. It was after this visit that she returned to the United States full of ideas for her artmaking. Leslie Camhi, in her article on Neshat entitled "Lifting the Veil," wonders whether Neshat's images are "elements in an imaginary autobiography, an effort to reclaim a lost identity or construct a fictitious past as an alternative to the years she spent in exile?"

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat

" It has been a great
challange for me
to create a type
pf narrative that
is not tied
to language, but
rather functions
purely ona visual
and sonic level.
Since the narrative
is non-literal,
abstract and often
quite ambiguous,
the veiwer must
rely heavily on her
or his own
imagination
to draw meanings."
( shirina Neshat Catalogue
Edizioni Charta- Milano
ISBN 88-8158-314-3
printed in Italy
709.04 Goldsmiths Library)



Ghazel

1966 Teherán, Irán. Vive en París, Francia.

Me in 2001 / Me in 2002 / Me in 2003

Tríptico, video instalación

Unsaying Life Stories:

The Self-Representational Art of Shirin Neshat and Ghazel

Aphrodite Désirée Navab
The Journal Of Aesthetic Education-

The Journal of Aesthetic Education 41.2 (2007) 39-66

Ghazel: Our Home Videos

Like Neshat, Ghazel's images represent the ambivalent consciousness of a hybrid Iranian who feels at once inside and outside, both in the West and the East. She was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1966. She left Iran at nineteen years of age and lived in several countries in the West for eleven years thereafter. She received her BA and MA in Visual Arts from the École des Beaux Arts, Nimes, France, and then a BA in Cinematography from Paul Valéry University, France, in 1994. The first time she went back to live in Iran was as a thirty-year-old woman.

They are her home movies, in an obsessively hilarious, un-egotistical way. Her self-obsession is at her own expense. She pokes fun at herself, her cultures, and the ludicrous situations in which her nomadic life, between East and West, has placed her. She films herself in Iran wearing her black chador doing everyday activities—from sports to chores. She acts out what she does and where she does it where she would normally—in her parents' home, her neighborhood, etc. But she does this always alone, without other actors. The duration of the films is real time; the scenes are as long as the action takes. There is only one take per scene. They are mostly in black and white. When she first began, her films were reconstructed souvenirs of her past, but gradually her films caught up with her actual life; they became contemporary. She started filming the present. For Ghazel, the camera is an ever-present witness watching her life unfold. Part documentary, part fiction, her autobiographical visual narrative lives and moves with her, as a parallel life.

By showing us her home videos, Ghazel has made the Me series our home videos, too. In her installations, she even displays her videos on small television screens, so as to place us in a "pseudo-home." But once we enter that space, we are made uncomfortable by witnessing Ghazel's own discomfort. From the comfort of our "home televisions" we are spectators to a hybrid identity at times painful, and at other times humorously displaced. The double source of information and meaning that we get from the visual image and the written text beneath seems to embody and exhibit Ghazel's own double consciousness. The visual image clashes with the mental image that the written text elicits in us, making us, too, no longer at home. No matter where we begin with her videos, first looking at the visual image and then the written text, or vice versa, we are left with this feeling of oddness, of not fitting. Each video re-presents the incongruous and inconsistent consciousness that she experiences daily.