Response to Sharin Neshat and Her Work

Sharin Neshat’s art style is one that contains a particularly high level of shock-value, in the way that what you see is what you get, plus the underlying messages that pertain to her photo-text images.  In addition, I believe that even if one never fully understands the messages behind her pieces, that person will still walk away with a certain residual feeling from viewing her work.  To be perfectly honest, her images frightened me—like horror movie frightened me.  I think there are multiple reasons behind this.  Perhaps it is the natural intensity of the eyes of the women photographed; I feel almost as if they are condemning me for not fully understanding the severity of their daily experiences.  It could be the contrast of the black and white in her images, creating a harsher, more intense environment within the images.  It might be the theme of her pieces in combination with their physical appearances.  But I think that is part of the motivation behind Neshat’s work, to move people in some emotional way, be it fear, sadness, anger, etc.  It’s not that other artists don’t maintain this motivation or achieve this, but I think that Neshat does it in a unique way, and particularly well at that.

In reading her interview, I found Neshat the woman to be strong, but much less intense than Neshat the artist (but this view comes from the limited work and biography I have been exposed to).  I enjoyed her point of view on feminism.  Even though I expected her to be a feminist as well, I wasn’t disappointed by the fact that she doesn’t identify with radical or dominant forms of feminism—this being anti-man, female-over-male ideologies.  I don’t want to really speak for Neshat, but I can see why she might resist the generally Western feminist views and create her own view (which I think is truly valid: “I am not generally interested in considering women’s rights in relation to equality with men, or in a competition with men, but rather within their own rights and feminine space”) because of the worldview she personally understands, which is a male-dominant/female-subordinate one—women and men are not at all equal, and they are too different to be equal.  Just for fun, I’d like to look up more of her work to see if my views on her and her work change.

I know that we are not really supposed to post images that are included in assignments or lectures for our blogs, but I can’t really veer away from Sharin Neshat in this post because of the ways her work affected me.  This is probably the most intense image for me, and I think the message is clear.  When a female is born into Iranian-Islam society, their role as a female is their fate, and they will never escape that fate so long as they are women living in that society.  When that baby girl grows up, she is amounted to a woman detained from her femininity (assuming she would otherwise gender herself as a feminine woman) in a man’s world.  It’s truly one of the most shocking pieces of art I have ever seen, without a doubt.  It’s pervasive and blunt, yet poignant.

~ Gina Marroquin