ON DEMAND: A Virtual Conversation on the making of Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams

Shirin Neshat’s photographs and videos address individual freedoms under attack from or repressed by social ideologies. Throughout most of Neshat’s career, she has been exiled from Iran, an outside observer of the increasing rigors of Islamic law’s effect on the country’s women and daily life. In 1990, Neshat visited Iran after twelve years. She was shocked to find women, following the 1979 Islamic revolution, forced to wear the chador, the traditional Islamic veil. Neshat returned to the United States to make the Women of Allah, 1994, a series of self-portraits in which she wears the chador. In the photographs, her face, feet, and hands (the only parts of the body allowed to be shown by Islamic law) are covered in Iranian poetry by Forough Farrokhzad and Tahereh Saffarzadeh. The poetry, placed in sharp contrast to the uniformity of the veil, suggests a personal depth and feeling that often goes unnoticed. The women of Allah are more than icons of oppression; they are complex individuals with desires and ambitions, moving between intense private thoughts and emotions and public political involvement.
 
The breadth of Neshat’s work extends beyond identity politics, however. As cultural critic Eleanor Heartney observed, Neshat “makes art through her identities as an Iranian and as a woman, but reshapes them to speak to larger issues of freedom, individuality, societal oppression, the pain of exile, and the power of the erotic.” Possessed, 2001, presents a woman without chador, roaming through the streets of an Iranian city. She is overcome with madness and is completely ignored until she takes a platform. Her private suffering then becomes public, and political, attracting a crowd that debates her mania. The mass of people subsequently takes on the traits of her madness, while the woman slips away unnoticed.
 
Rapture, 1999, is one part of a trilogy produced by Neshat that includes the other highly acclaimed works Turbulent, 1998, and Fervor, 2000. Rapture shows a divided world where architecture and landscape stand as metaphors for entrenched cultural beliefs about men and women. The men are trapped in a fortress while the women make a long journey through the desert to the sea. While the men wrestle and pray, the women eventually board small boats to leave the land entirely. As with Possessed, Rapture’s poetic potential taps into the collective dreams, fantasies, and horrors confronting the Iranian people. 

The founding producer and director of The Artist Profile Archive, Sophie Chahinian, a Los Angeles native, earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Occidental College. She became involved with independent film production as both a producer and actor before she began working for Light and Space artist Eric Orr in the late 1990s. In her capacity as his studio manager, she interacted with many other Southern California artists such as Ed Moses, Larry Bell, and Robert Irwin. Wanting a more formal education in the field, she moved to England and earned an M.A. in Contemporary Art from the University of Manchester through Sotheby’s Institute of Art London.

During her studies she read many insightful, academic texts, prompting her to reflect upon her own experience of listening to artists in their own voices, providing an incomparable personal perspective. It was then that she decided to start The Artist Profile Archive as a platform for primary information, allowing artists the opportunity to talk about their own work, in their own words. Her film experience and her formal education in contemporary art proved an effective combination for interviewing artists in their own environments, talking extemporaneously about their work, from which she creates intimate video portraits made up exclusively of the artist speaking and footage of the artist’s work.

Sophie’s hope is that by sharing these films of working artists discussing their personal backgrounds, creative challenges, sources of inspiration and artistic practices, more people will become engaged with contemporary art and realize its capacity to unite people by identifying the commonality of the human experience.

Learn more at https://www.theartistprofilearchive.com/

Andrea Grover is the Executive Director of Guild Hall, the cornerstone cultural institution of East Hampton, that combines a museum, theater, and education center. Guild Hall is presently undergoing a facility-wide capital improvements project to bring the 1930s-era building and grounds up to state-of-the-art performance and functionality. Grover has 25 years of experience in curatorial and nonprofit leadership with a focus on innovative and participatory arts programming. Most recently, she was the curator of the 2021 exhibition, Alexis Rockman Shipwrecks presented at Guild Hall, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, The Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC, and Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ. Prior to joining Guild Hall in 2016, she was the Curator of Special Projects at the Parrish Art Museum, where she was awarded both a Tremaine Foundation and an AADA Curatorial Award for her exhibition, Radical Seafaring. At the Parrish, she established the extremely popular community-driven program PechaKucha Night Hamptons, and the exhibition series Parrish Road Show and Platform. Grover founded the nonprofit film center Aurora Picture Show, Houston, Texas, at age 27. With expertise in artists who work in scientific or technological spaces (art + science), she has served as a panelist or advisor for Pew Foundation for Arts & Heritage, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Rauschenberg Foundation, and Bogliasco Foundation. She has taught interdisciplinary courses at the University of Houston, and Texas Southern University, and has been a guest speaker or juror at SXSW Interactive, Austin, Texas, and Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, among many others. Grover has received fellowships from the Center for Curatorial Leadership, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Warhol Foundation. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA from Syracuse University.

http://www.andreagrover.com/