A young photographer called Simin emerges through double doors carved into a forbidding mountain face somewhere in the desert in southwestern U.S., climbs into her 1980s Mercedes-Benz and coasts into town to collect the townsfolk’s dreams. At the day’s end, Simin brings her haul back to the mountain that houses an archive, run by a complex and curiously Persian-speaking bureaucracy. Dreams of lost children, nuclear bombs, husbands saved from bus wrecks, the ordinary and extraordinary, are carefully recorded and filed by clerks in white lab coats.
Two films about Simin’s work are part of Iranian-born Shirin Neshat’s newest work, “Land of Dreams,” now debuting at the Broad. “Land of Dreams” also includes a room full of large-scale black and white portrait photographs. Of course, Simin is, in essence, Shirin: Neshat traveled around New Mexico in the spring of 2019 together with artist Lina Bertucci, talking to regular folks and taking their photographs in Farmington, Las Vegas and Albuquerque.
The alternate reality presented in “Land of Dreams” is a meditation on what it is like to live in the United States as a foreigner at this time of increasing xenophobia and hostile anti-immigration rhetoric. In Simin, you can see Neshat watching, listening and analyzing the people around her, taking the temperature of her surroundings – as if in order to understand, but also to protect oneself from harm the way all permanent outsiders must.
After a summer and fall punctuated by news of US-Iranian tensions, Neshat’s retrospective feels especially timely.
Neshat, born in 1957, became known in the mid-1990s for her large-scale black and white photographs featuring Persian script imposed on faces, hands, feet and chests. She had emigrated to the U.S. in 1975, and her photographs were a reaction to the changes the Iranian revolution had wrought in the lives of Iranians – especially women, whose freedoms were harshly curtailed in the revolution’s wake. No more short skirts, no more co-ed beach days, no more singing in public.
Over her 25-year career, Neshat never shied from politics and the effect it has on us, be it in the two-channel video “Tooba” (2002), dealing with the aftermath of 9/11, or the portrait series “Book of Kings” (2012), taking on Iran’s Green movement formed to protest Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election in 2009.
In particular, “Women of Allah” (1993–97) makes you pause in the echo-y galleries of the Broad Art Museum. In the photographs Neshat poses in a chador or a burial kafan with rifles, clearly playing with complex ideas of faith and devotion, cruelty and violence, but also taboo and subversion. Although Neshat made the images two decades ago, it is difficult for a present-day viewer not to think of propaganda images disseminated by ISIS. In ISIS’s propaganda, Arabic script has a powerful function: marking the images and the culture they represent as foreign, other, illegible to a Western viewer.
As for Neshat’s Persian script, the exhibition glosses over it. The wall labels tell us that it is often poetry by Forugh Farrokhzad (1934–1967),and we are given a couple of translated examples, but a viewer not well-versed in Persian can’t tell what exactly is written on those faces, hands and soles of feet. Surely, it is not insignificant which exact words are legible on which face, on which foot. Is the decision not to provide translations intentional? Would translations make the exhibition too unwieldy to experience? The effect is to create distance instead of understanding.
(To be sure, the wall labels work pretty hard, trying to explain to Los Angeles art crowds the codes obvious to an Iranian viewer: how much skin is indecent? What does hamsa, a hand posed upright, signify? Often the wall labels work a little too hard, offering neat and tidy interpretations of the works that leave very little for the viewer to experience.)
Shirin Neshat’s video pieces stand solidly on their own, however, and bridge cultural gaps without need for didactic wall labels, starting with her early two-channel video installations. In “Turbulent” (1998), Neshat shows a man singing to a crowd on one side and a woman singing to an empty auditorium on the other. In “Rapture” (1999), you see men storming city gates to your left and to your right, chador-clad women flapping in the desert like a murder of crows. There is no need to read about the separation of sexes in Iran to see what Neshat is doing. Take your time with these: there are many videos, but they are well worth watching, showing the progession of Neshat’s vision.
Literature, music and the strong, dreamlike images in black and white are the red threads running through the exhibition: the veiled women in front of forbidding modernist buildings in the “Soliloquy” series from the late 1990s; the huddle of women digging a grave with their bare hands in “Passage” (2001); the woman flying away from her mother in “Roja” (2016).
The individual experience in the face of institutions; mourning and familiar relations: Neshat’s images continue to be distinctly foreign but speak of experiences that are universally recognized.
Shirin Neshat: “I Will Greet the Sun Again”
Through Feb. 16
The Broad Art Museum, Los Angeles
Header image: Shirin Neshat, Land of Dreams video still, 2019. © Shirin Neshat. Courtesy the artist, Gladstone Gallery and Goodman Gallery.