Dog Star Selects Shirin Neshat - Being Arab & Female in a Tuburlent World

Dog Star finds Shirin's work to be elegant, smart and confrontational.  She is asserting her unique place as an Arab and Muslim woman in a secular and religious world.  As an artist she often blends these worlds to present engaging photography and video.  If this sounds a little bit interesting then DO NOT MISS THIS SHOW!  At Barbara Gladstone Gallery (more here), Shirin Neshat (more here) presents a new series of photographs and a video installation, both of which explore the underlying conditions of power within socio-cultural structures. Inspired by the sweeping momentum of recent political uprisings in the Arab world, Neshat turned to both historical and contemporary sources to generate richly provocative metaphors for the network of relations that comprise a society.  The new photographic series, titled The Book of Kings, is named after the ancient book Shahnameh (The Book of Kings), a long poem of epic tragedies written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 AD. Shahnameh retells the mythical and historical past of Greater Iran from the creation of the world until the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th Century. Divided into three groups—the Masses, the Patriots, and the Villains—Neshat’s portraits of Iranian and Arab youth comprise black and white photographs with meticulously executed calligraphic texts and drawings inscribed over each subject’s face and body. 

 These texts and illustrations—drawn from Shahnameh as well as from contemporary poetry by Iranian writers and prisoners—both obscure and illuminate the subjects’ facial expressions and emotive intensity, intimately linking the current energy of contemporary Iran with its mythical and historical past. In this arresting body of work, Neshat returns to the confrontational nature of her iconic Women of Allah series, while re-focusing on themes of revolution and the bold-faced defiance of youth.  In her new three-channel video installation, Neshat draws upon themes of justice and the struggle of the artist against the constraints of authoritarian rule. Creating a space where moral judgment is questioned and the viewer’s allegiances oscillate between identifying with the victim and being accomplice to power, Neshat investigates the repressed and unspoken elements of social and cultural consensus through this bold new work.   On view from January 13 – February 11, 2012 at 515 West 24 Street- ALWAYS FREE!