The exotic and the everyday
Shirin Neshat's startling films take life in Iran and turn it into something poetic. She tells Richard Williams about her new work
Art galleries are normally places of private contemplation and reaction. When three of Shirin Neshat's short films were shown at the Serpentine Gallery two years ago, however, the response was very different. People lingered in front of the screens, transfixed by not just the austere beauty of the images but the intensity and directness of the emotional charge they conveyed and, for western viewers, the sudden insights they provided into the complexities of Islam's relationship with itself and with the modern world.
"That was one of the most satisfying experiences I've had," says the Iranian artist as she prepares to leave her New York home for the performances of a new work, Logic of the Birds, which opens a six-night run at London's Union Chapel next week. "I've never had such a diverse public. I was there for a couple of weekends and you had Arabs coming in, artists coming in, people out walking in Hyde Park who came in - and their attention span was amazing. It made me feel that for my work, London is the best place."
Although they required actors, singers and crew, the three films - Turbulent, Rapture and Fervour - seemed very clearly the work of a single controlling intelligence. But in Logic of the Birds, already seen this year in New York and Minneapolis, Neshat is joined at the top of the credits by three of her regular collaborators, all fellow Iranian exiles in New York: the singer Sussan Deyhim, the film-maker and cinematographer Ghasem Ebrahimian, and the writer and film-maker Shoja Azari, who is also Neshat's partner. "This is four people's vision combined into one," Neshat says, "and an experiment for all of us."
Neshat left Iran in 1974, aged 17, to study art at the University of California in Berkeley. Most of her contemporaries were sent to Europe and were expected to get married before they could complete their studies. "My father was a doctor, but he was what I would call an intellectual - very well-read and very interested in knowledge. He insisted that I get as much education as my brothers." The revolution meant that she was unable to return to Iran until 1990, and it was only then that her career as an artist began. "Until then," she says, "I felt I had nothing to contribute."
Between 1993 and 1997 she produced a widely noticed series of black and white photographs called Women of Allah, in which she superimposed Farsi calligraphy on the hands and faces of her subjects, some of whom were carrying guns. Soon she transferred her concerns and her aesthetic sensibility to film, and her reputation was made in 1999 when Turbulent won the international prize at the Venice Biennale. British audiences first saw it installed in a church in the City of London before it became part of the Serpentine show. Her latest film, titled Tooba, received its premiere at the Documenta festival in Germany this summer before becoming the first of her pieces to be shown in her native country, at an exhibition in Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art.
Like Tooba, Logic of the Birds finds Neshat moving away from her familiar black and white into colour. Based on The Conference of the Birds, a fable by the 12th-century Sufi poet and philosopher Farid al'Din Attar, the hour-long piece incorporates film, music and live staging. "We were interested in experimenting with the idea of bringing film-making and live performance closer together, to the point where the narrative is conveyed through the film but is also unfolded on the stage."
In Attar's poem a female bird leads her sceptical fellows off in search of a mythical ruler of their kingdom. "It's about reflection and self-discovery, and it's about looking within yourself to find leadership; it also has a feminist twist because the main bird is female. We wanted to make a piece that touched on some of the philosophical aspects of the story without attempting to make a literal translation of an epic text. Here, we're interested in the mystical aspect of the story, touching on the notion of this crowd looking for a saviour. They're travelling to look for a leader, but essentially they should be looking inside, not outside."
The political and social condition of Iran is again the focus. "You could relate this story to a country anywhere in the world, but in our country we're always waiting for a leader to come and save us, and there's a perpetual sense of betrayal. Ultimately, then, that's not where you should be looking. The story is about individuality, identity, uniqueness. The dynamic of the mass versus the individual is at the heart of the poem. In parts of the Islamic world today the notion of individuality has become very problematic."
There are no birds in this version of the story, but the main character, leading a flock on a mysterious journey, is played on the screen and on the stage by Deyhim, whose extra- ordinary improvised ululations dominated Turbulent. Deyhim and Neshat began their collaboration only four years ago, but they had met many years earlier in California.
"She was a dancer then, and I was just mesmerised by her. I was pretty conventional in those days, a typical Californian-Iranian girl, but she was so radical in her work that I was like, wow. Many years later I was living in New York and I saw a poster advertising her concert. I went along and I was blown away by how she had transformed herself from a dancer into an improvisational singer.
"Once we found each other again, we somehow clicked. We've both spent many years outside Iran, we both had a pretty wild lifestyle, an independent life away from our families, and we had to go through all sorts of channels to survive. And yet we're so interested in where we come from, and proud of it, and we're looking for a language that's a hybrid of the traditional and the modern.
"When I met her again she had just moved to New York from London with Richard Horowitz, her collaborator. I was thinking about making Turbulent, and I got introduced to Shoja and Ghasem around the same time. The whole group came together in that project and since then we've been more or less inseparable. It wasn't just a question of bringing our different experiences to what we could create as a work of art, but also of the need that we had as Iranians to create a sense of community, a home. We wanted to be around each other and the art was an excuse to continue the relationship."
Despite her involvement in the fate of her own people, two years ago Neshat was still able to say, in an interview with Time magazine: "I'm an artist, so I'm not an activist. I don't have an agenda." But while she and her partners were preparing Logic of the Birds, September 11 happened a few hundred yards down the street from her SoHo loft. Since then the west's attitude to Islam has become rather more difficult, and her view of her own role has changed.
"I'm beginning to feel that activism isn't such a bad thing," she says now. "I'm really interested in social justice, and if an artist has a certain power of being heard and voicing something important, it's right to do it. It could still be done in such a way that it's not aggressive or overly didactic. I'm trying to find that form."
She regretted that the attacks had not raised America's consciousness. "Instead we're faced with an increasing sense of ignorant, simplistic patriotism that reiterates a deep sense of arrogance. What has happened in Palestine in recent months, with the Americans giving carte blanche to Israel to destroy a nation, is unforgivable. If Palestine had oil, of course, they would have been worth defending, but they have nothing and therefore Americans feel no need of humanitarian justice.
'In Iraq we're faced once again with the hypocrisy of a government that misleads its people and the world in saying one thing but meaning another. Most of us know that the removal of Saddam Hussein is essentially not the aim, which is gaining access to the oil and Republicans winning an election. Of course I don't support corrupt Islamic governments but I care about the Muslims and how the economic and political pressures have created a volatile situation both inside and outside their countries. Ultimately, fundamentalism and terrorism breed in such an environment."
It would be bound to affect her work, she says, even if the treatment remained at a symbolic level. "It could be something very metaphoric, very abstract. I've been careful in all my exploration of this subject not to point fingers, but I feel it's almost come to the point where that lack of a position is itself taking a position. So I'll make work that may touch on the absurdity and hypocrisy at both ends and reveal how vulnerable yet powerful an individual may be in taking charge of their own destiny and refusing to be controlled spiritually, morally and politically."
The westerner looking at her pieces will almost certainly not see what an Iranian sees. "Sometimes it's almost as if they're totally opposite," she says. But no one could miss the real point. However abstracted and metaphoric the approach may be, however ravishingly exotic the sights and sounds, the struggle of individuals claiming the right to control their own destiny and identity is what compels the gaze.
Logic of the Birds is at the Union Chapel, London N1, November 6-9, 11 and 12. Box office: 08700 600 100 or
www.ticketweb.co.uk.
