Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again surveys approximately 30 years of the multidisciplinary artist’s video works and photography, investigating Neshat’s passionate engagement with ancient and recent Iranian history, the experience of living in exile, and the human impact of political revolution.
Taking its title from a poem by the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1934–1967), I Will Greet the Sun Again begins with Neshat’s most famous body of work, Women of Allah, 1993–97. The exhibition then features her early iconic video works such as Rapture, 1999, Turbulent, 1998, and Passage, 2001; monumental photography installations including The Book of Kings, 2012, and The Home of My Eyes, 2015; and Land of Dreams, 2019, a new, ambitious work encompassing a body of photographs and two recent videos.
The exhibition journeys from works that address specific events in contemporary Iran, both before and after the Islamic Revolution, to works that increasingly use metaphor and ancient Persian history and literature to reflect on universal concerns of gender, political borders, and rootedness.
Throughout her career, Neshat has constructed metaphoric worlds in which women and men assume cultural gestures and poses, often assembling and giving voice to real people who have lived through seismic events of recent history, including the Green Movement in Iran and the Arab Spring in Egypt.
Neshat’s own seismic event was leaving Iran in 1975, when she was 17 years old, to study at the University of California at Berkeley. Due to the Islamic Revolution (1978–79) and the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88), Neshat had to continue to live outside of her home country, separated from family. Being dislocated or between cultures, politics, and worlds figures prominently throughout her work.
Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again is organized by The Broad, Los Angeles, and curated by Ed Schad, Curator, The Broad.
The presentation in Fort Worth is made possible in part by a grant from the Fort Worth Tourism Public Improvement District.
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