Shirin Neshat (b. 1957, Qazvin, Iran) completed her education in the USA in 1974, five years later the Islamic Revolution prevented her from returning to her home country for almost twenty years. Her personal experiences as a Muslim woman in exile have informed her practice in which she employs photography, video installation, cinema and performance to explore political structures that have shaped the history of Iran and other Middle Eastern nations. Neshat portrays the alienation of women in repressive Muslim societies interrogating the role reserved for women Islamic value systems. In her practice, she employs poetic imagery to engage with themes of gender and society, the individual and the collective, and the dialectical relationship between past and present, through the lens of her experiences of belonging and exile.
Read MoreShe has had solo exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, León, Spain, and the the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Neshat was included in Prospect.1, the 2008 New Orleans Biennial, Documenta 11, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and the 1999 Venice Biennale. Neshat was awarded the Silver Lion at the 66th International Venice Film Festival (2009), the Lillian Gish Prize (2006), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), and the First International Award at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999). Neshat’s commission for the fourth edition of Performa, OverRuled, premiered in November 2011. A major retrospective of the artist’s work, organised by the Detroit Institute of Arts, opened in April 2013. Dreamers marked her first solo show on the African continent, which exhibited at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in 2016. That same year, Neshat featured in the New Revolutions: Goodman Gallery at 50 exhibition in Johannesburg and in the Summers group exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape Town.
The artist lives and works in New York, USA.
Text courtesy Goodman Gallery.