In Turbulent (1998), a wall-sized video projection shows a dark-haired man in a crisp white shirt walking out onto a stage. Other men in white shirts occupy the wooden auditorium seats. The man turns his back on the audience and begins to sing into a vintage silver microphone. His voice is beautifully resonant as he sings in a plaintive and imploring tone. As he sings, he faces us as well as the image projected on the opposite wall. It shows the back of a woman clad in a flowing black robe, her head covered with a long black lace scarf. She faces the same auditorium, but the seats are empty.
The man finishes singing and turns to the audience, which claps enthusiastically. Suddenly we hear a low, sonorous tone that gradually becomes louder. The man turns as if he hears it, to stand slightly open-mouthed in front of the microphone. On the opposite screen the camera slowly and sensuously pans around to the woman's face. She sings a wordless song of pure emotion. Some sounds seem to come from deep down, as with a Siberian throat-singer; others ring out clear, echoing like the call to prayer; there is a cluster of sounds like a flock of startled birds and a repetitive, gasping lowing that sounds orgasmic in its acceleration.
The man has delivered a conventionally beautiful, classical love chant based on a 13th-century poem by Jalal-al-Din Rumi, a Sufi mystic. But the impact of his voice has been negated by the woman's pure, visceral vocals. No one has gathered to hear her, but her power is such that they hear her just the same. It is a fantastic piece, characteristic of Neshat's ability to create striking image juxtapositions and to skillfully use the emotionally evocative power of music. Composer and performer Sussan Deyhim played the woman and created her audio.
Because she's Iranian, because she's a woman, it is tempting for people to view Shirin Neshat's work through a political lens, and to interpret it solely as a commentary on the relationships between men and women in traditional Islamic society or the extremes of postrevolutionary Iran. While this is certainly an element of the work, adhering to such a specific and narrow interpretation does the work and the artist a disservice.
Neshat left Iran at age 17 to pursue her studies in the United States. She visited her home country again after the Islamic revolution to find a country that was almost unrecognizable, so sweeping had been the changes from the Shah's secular dictatorship to the Ayatollah's dictatorial theocracy. Shirin considers herself a Western artist; she began her career here and is based in New York.
But distance has allowed her to pluck powerful, dramatic and "exotic" elements from her culture. Her long absence allows her to view it with a level of objectivity mixed with the fascination of an outsider. She is equally fluent in Western culture and is able to view it with a similar incisiveness. Her work Soliloquy (2000) juxtaposes two films of Neshat herself wearing a chador. One places her in a starkly beautiful village in Turkey with ancient stone-walled buildings; the other shows her in an urban Western city. The videos are shown opposite each other, and each woman pauses, seemingly to watch the other. The films end with one woman fleeing across a hilly, arid landscape, while the other disappears down a desolate city street, as Neshat explores the dislocation and the isolation of a woman trapped between cultures.
In Neshat's films, the chador-wearing figures have starkly sculptural visual presences. The connotations of the chador depend on who you are and where you're from. In our increasingly Muslim-phobic country, it can signify a threatening image of an alien culture. For more moderate people, including some Muslims, it symbolizes Islamic extremism and the oppression of women. Veiling of women was outlawed in Iran by the Pahlavi dynasty in the 1930s until the 1978 revolution, when, as one Iranian woman puts it, "Iran antiquated itself by a hundred years."
The chador is a mark of female modesty that is forced in Iran, but covering and veiling is a complicated issue. In attempts to modernize and Westernize, veiling was banned in Turkey in the late 1920s, and head scarves still are not allowed in public institutions and universities. Some Muslim women choose to cover themselves out of religious devotion, as a political statement, because it is traditional dress or because wearing an abaya (a long loose cloak), hijab (head scarf) or chador is a way to protect themselves from unwanted male attention. Any woman who has walked through a conservative area in an Islamic country with her head uncovered, in clothes that indicate a waist or reveal a collarbone, ankle or elbow, knows that covering can also be a pragmatic decision.
