We meet, the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat and I, in the desert - Death Valley, California; the American desert, sure, but still an apt place for the paths of two strangers to cross. A neutral place, you could say. Home to nothing but coyotes and rattlesnakes, where the land stretches out before you flat and unadorned like so much bleached Tarmac. Neshat takes me 100 or so miles north-east, to the old goldmining town of Tonopah. It's like a ghost town, haunted by its own past. All the mines are closed now; the casino is shut up; most of its little motels are empty.
Neshat is here, from her New York home, with a group of Iranian friends, her artistic collaborators since 1998 - director Shoja Azari, cinematographer Ghasem Ebrahimian, actors Mohamed Ghaffari and Shahram Karimi - to make a film based on Kafka's black comedy, The Penal Colony. In the past 10 years, working as a visual artist, she has moved from stills photography, a single image, to film installations, usually dual projections with music in the place of words; still visual art, but moving closer to film. "I had begun to feel, even early on, a kind of resentment about visual art that you are expected to stay in one place, within one discipline." She likes a cross-disciplinary approach. "It gives me a freedom, it enables me to keep a distance from visual art, from cinema. Because I am nothing entirely. I am in between."
The way they work, she explains, is to play different parts on each others' projects. Azari, for instance, was in her film Turbulent; the Kafka is his project, he is directing while Neshat works on costumes. The next film will be directed by Ebrahimian. They are "a team" she says, but with no leader, no single authority, no all-prevailing point of view.
She has learned, she says, with these people, and as an artist, the danger of pushing a point of view. They have in common Iran, Islam, but their backgrounds and experience are very different. Azari was a student activist, imprisoned after the revolution, who escaped from Iran. Neshat went to America in 1974, at 17, four years before the revolution, and returned for the first time in 1990. Since then, she has been going back and forth, making work that doesn't try to validate or repudiate Islam. "People ask, 'Where are you coming from? What do you really think about Islam? What is your work trying to say?' I have been criticised for not taking a position, for not having a point of view." But, for her, these are the wrong questions, depending on the assumption that the world is singular, that all that differs is where you are standing. Which becomes in turn an expression not of any truth about the world, merely of how you see it. "Everyone has a point of view. I don't happen to find that very interesting." Put simplistically, there is a view of Islam that it is demonic. A view of Islam that it is sacred. No possibility of dialogue exists between the two. You can say no point of view is valid. You can say every point of view is equally valid. Impasse.
But what happens if you flip this around. If you make not the world but the point of view fixed, make it somewhere in the middle, and spin different worlds around this. Neshat's most recent film work has played with this idea. Two screens running simultaneously, presenting parallel worlds, parallel stories, in some ways clearly oppositional but with points of intersection, and the viewer always in between. It's her reply to the question "Who are you?" Again the wrong question. And the answer, "I am in between."
She must have started out knowing where she came from. She is the fourth of five children of wealthy parents, brought up in the religious town of Qazvin in north-western Iran. Her father was a doctor, her mother a housewife, but westernised. "My parents both adored the Shah. Our lifestyle changed so much under the Shah. We had his picture on the wall. They would never believe what they heard about Savak, about his secret police. They couldn't accept that." Certain traditional values were observed. The daughters would never go to the bazaar or enter a mosque unveiled. "Out of respect, out of tradition. Not for religious reasons." Her father refused to go to the movie theatre. "He felt it would ruin his reputation." Through her grandparents, her mother's parents, she learned traditional religious values. "My grandmother always wore the veil, she prayed each day. Both my grandparents disliked the Shah." Her father's view prevailed, and he wanted his children educated at boarding school in Tehran and then at university in the US. He bought the image of the west that the Shah offered. "He fantasised about the west, romanticised the west, and slowly rejected all his own values; both my parents did. What happened, I think, was that their identity slowly dissolved, they exchanged it for comfort. It served their class."
Even in the early-70s, dissent in Iran was becoming obvious. At school, she had friends who listened to Khomeini's broadcasts from Iraq. "Though I didn't." She played no part in the increasing student radicalism. As the gap between rich and poor widened, an alliance was forged between the intellectuals, the religious and the poor. "People were fed up with the west. There was a strong intellectual movement to reinterpret Islam in a contemporary way, to make sense of it as a philosophy, not just a religious ideology. And a feeling that it could be re-organised, readapted, and it could work. The desire for purification, to get rid of the west, to bring back something that reflected our history. A sense of democracy to do with community, with devotion, sacrifice."
And it was at roughly this moment that she was sent to college in America by her father; it would not have occurred to her to protest. Cut off from the experience of her peers, from her own history, arriving in the US as Watergate broke, she made attempts to adapt. Joined Iranian organisations, "which did nothing, could do nothing but talk". Married, twice. First an Afro-American. Then a Korean, with whom she has her son, Cyrus. At home, the revolution broke, then the Iran-Iraq war, with Iran being bombed every day. She could not get in touch with her parents. Her sisters and brother had already returned home. She was completely alone. And for her the myth of the west just fell apart. She couldn't sustain some notion of herself as a point in someone else's - her father's, the Shah's - fantasy. The world that we take for granted in the west she saw as illusion. Without a mother, a father, a homeland, without loyalties, ambitions, she could no longer make sense of herself. She certainly couldn't be an artist. There were no clashes, no tensions out of which to make art. It seems obvious now that what was happening to her paralleled what had happened in her country under the Shah. The collapse of her identity into another's - the west's. So she worked with her husband in his art gallery. "I didn't think about being an artist for another 10 years. It took me that long before I was mentally prepared."
Going back to Iran was bound to be a process of regret; in a kind of reverse process of her father's idealisation of the west, she began to idealise Islam. She fell for the revolution, if not for its effect, for the impulse that had created it. And for the fall-out, the elevation of martyrdom. She envied her friends their "12 years of nightmare". "I have to say I became very attracted to what they had gone through. When I looked at myself, at what I had gone through, it seemed I had spent my life without commitment. There was this need to be attracted by something other than my own reality. Something that could change me, wake me up." Looking around her she would think, "I am from here. I look like everybody else. I haven't experienced anything of what they have gone through, but I belong here." It became an obsession. She felt angry with her family for sending her away. "I felt I would have been a better person had I stayed."
She found herself pleading with the culture ministry to let her design a sculpture for a national park. "Then I remembered I can't sculpt." Every time she returned to America, depression would set in. As if in a love affair, she wanted what she'd found to last and never to change. Her first work after 1990, a series of photographs exhibited in 1993 and entitled Women Of Allah, reflects this naive longing. She had found her subject, women and Islam, and her boundary - Islam regarded on its own terms - but not yet the distance to reflect any ambiguity. So the photographs come over as prettified, almost chic, objects. Sometimes a sexual tease, a flirtation. A beautiful woman, Neshat herself, has her face bisected by a gun, with calligraphy, Farsi poetry, projected on to her face. Or a photograph of a woman's feet, again calligraphically inscribed, a gun held between the feet. Analytically, perhaps, interesting. The beauty of the body, the will to violence, the calligraphy indicating an intellectual and emotional engagement that women were not permitted to express. They are reflections, she says, on the military participation of women in the revolution: Islam trained women to fight in the Iran-Iraq war, the one area in which they could be equal to men. And the paradox of their enforced submissiveness and their strength. "It is why I decided that women had to be the focus of my work because they embody, in a way men do not, the value systems of that society."
She accepts now that the work was immature. "I don't regret the early work. I had to do it. And I appreciate that naivety and pure obsession now. It came out of a sincerity. But it's true I see things differently now." The work was too structured, too accepting, but as brave as she could be at that time. It looked back. "I started off making work that did seek to justify Islam. It was important for me to believe in something positive about Islam. Maybe to say: this makes no sense according to your, the west's, rationale. But you can't evaluate those people in your system of thinking."
Then there is a leap, not of imagination, but of sensibility. As if the child, whose identity depends on authority, suddenly grows up. No adolescent phase, no rebellion, but a clear understanding that the world is the clash of incompatible points of view. East/west. Male/female. So far nothing new. But when she takes this idea and translates it into the world of Islam, into the closed world of women in Islam - a world closed to the west because it seems to us purely submissive, a world of victimhood. By no means a neutral world to us. For the women of Islam a closed world because of social controls: the veil; no access to the public domain; suppression of sexuality. So by no means a neutral world to them. She makes play of these differences, a creative tension close to drama.
When Neshat first came to use film, she was influenced by the work of the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, whose A Taste Of Cherry won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. "What I love about Kiarostami is that he has created an aesthetic that works so sufficiently within the limitations. He doesn't go for controversial issues that would be attractive to the outsider and even more to Iranians. He stays detached. His films are culturally specific but he doesn't feed a fashionable curiosity about Islam. They are journeys, narratives and though they are in one way specific to Iran they are also universal." What she saw also in his work was precisely the kind of uncertainty about what the viewer is seeing, at the same time reality and illusion, that she wanted in her own work.
She began experimenting, and in 1998 produced Turbulent, a split-screen installation, on one side a man, on the other a woman. Since then she has made two more films, Rapture in 1999 and Fervour in 2000: "A trilogy based around the issues of gender." Unlike Kiarostami, who has no choice but to work within the limitations permitted, she chose to improvise within those boundaries. "I am not making work in Iran, so I could have gone any way." When making the work, she thinks first about Iran. "Because there are so many things that we don't ever discuss among ourselves. My intention is to formulate it in a way that, although it is very much about Iran, it touches on issues that go beyond our difference."
There is common ground, she is saying. The idea that there is one world, one linear rational point of view that can ravel everything up into sense, is peculiarly male and by no means confined to the east. It is true, she says, that feminism as we understand it in the west, "about equality, about creating a balance of effort", could never apply in Islam. "Women have their place, men have their place. It is never about being equal to men. Women accept their domestic responsibility; it is what gives them strength. They don't see themselves as submissive or victims. They break the rules, but they do it in a quiet, subtle way. I am not saying that the view of the outsider is completely false, but that it is exaggerated. So in my work I try to show that kind of candid feminism that can only be understood if you think about it in their terms."
Fervour, she says, closes the chapter on the subject of gender. The screens are no longer opposite but next to each other. The sexual taboos that it focuses on apply both to man and woman, "so I wanted them on the same side". It opens with a man and a woman walking in a landscape, the desert. Momentarily, their paths intersect. They are alone. They stop for a moment. We can sense the sexual friction. They walk on. Later, at a public gathering, now separated from each other by a curtain, each becomes aware of the other's presence. A speaker addresses the crowd about the dangers of sexual desire. And finally, in a kind of disgust at herself, at the situation, at their mutual acquiescence in this taboo that says men and women who are strangers cannot touch, cannot even meet the other's gaze, the woman walks out. There are taboos, social codes that function externally, she is saying. These you can see. But just as insidious are the taboos that we carry within us. In that moment, even when alone, when no one could have seen them, they could not transgress. "They may not be the same, but we all have these taboos, you know," she says
• Shirin Neshat will show at the Serpentine Gallery, London, from July 28-September 3.
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