Shirin Neshat

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Through June 29

Shirin Neshat makes seamlessly choreographed, parable-like films operating fully within the tradition of Iranian film, despite having never actually worked there. Based in New York, Neshat sets her intimate films in an Iran of the mind, while actual locations range from Turkey to Morocco. Short and wordless, they are screened in specifically designed installations, visual and sonic elements overlapping and commenting upon one another, the intensely cinematic imagery engulfed in voice, music and sound.

Neshat’s new single-channel films, shot in Essaouira, the same Moroccan town where Orson Wells filmed his ill-fated Othello continue to elaborate on issues of desire, identity, and loss as seen through the prism of Islam.

Possessed, one of three new works, addresses the alienating power of difference through the story of a woman whose untraditional appearance (unveiled, unaccompanied, wearing only a long white tunic) and eccentric behavior (wandering, gesturing, shouting) disrupts the homogeneity of a small village. Her desperate exhortations—with voice and sound by Sussan Deyhim flowing in and out of synch with the woman’s wailings—arouse curiosity, consternation, and finally riotous anger from a crowd unable to accommodate her disturbing presence: is she a madwoman, witch, or prophetess?

Another piece, Pulse, peers into the darkened recesses of a cell-like bedchamber, picking up on a key element in Neshat’s work: the psychological temperature of architecture. A solitary woman crouches devotionally by a radio, which broadcasts a plaintive male voice. In an attitude of pained longing, she accompanies the distant, disembodied song, in a gently epiphanous dialogue of mutual lamentation and exile.

Passage is a collaboration with composer Philip Glass, which presents the narrative of a funeral procession and burial in a remote desert; the film suffers under the stewardship of Glass’ bombastic minimalism, which burdens Neshat’s often mesmerizing and austere imagery. While Neshat has been criticized by some for not taking a more explicitly feminist stance regarding gender inequities in post-revolutionary Iran, she clearly prefers to explore potentially divisive issues without resorting to easy polemics. She also seems to enjoy the ambiguity of poetic distance, and its resistance to reductive interpretation, which gives her work its compelling strength.




James Trainor