Framing the veil

Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 the Muslim female dress has become a contested site of two incommensurable cultures, the West and the Middle East. Even before the Revolution, the figure of the woman covered by the robe was already becoming a more dangerous character in popular culture.

Who can forget the female terrorists in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film, The Battle of Algiers (1966), shedding their chadors to successfully plant bombs in the European part of the city? But while the women in Pontecorvo’s film unveiled to become invisible, Neshat reverses this act by re-veiling her women to make them more visible.

Neshat first caught the attention of the New York art scene in the mid-1990s with Women of Allah (1993–97), her startling photographs of rifle-toting Iranian women (often the artist herself) with Persian calligraphy inscribed on their exposed faces and hands. In an iconic black and white image from the series, Rebellious Silence (1994), a woman wearing a black chador and holding an American rifle glares unflinchingly at the camera, as if posing a challenge to the viewer.

After the success of her photography, and inspired by the works of great Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami, Neshat began to use the medium of video, again conjuring the woman in the chador as a beguiling trope. In her first video, Anchorage (1996), the artist, covered in a black chador, recites a prayer from the Quran, points and fires a rifle at the viewer, and performs a Sufi dance. In Shadow Under the Web (1997), which is a simulcast of four videos projected on walls, the veiled Neshat runs in an endless loop across iconic sites of tension between tradition and modernity, shifting her focus to something more personal: the view of an Iranian woman living in exile.

In a conversation with Shoja Azari, published in Shirin Neshat: 2002–2005 (Charta, 2005), she told her collaborator and future husband that the notion of veiling “philosophically operates in many ways in Islam.” She elaborated: “My understanding is that in Islam, the hijab dictates a need to establish boundaries, curtains, or borders to separate the inside/outside, private/public, sacred/profane, but most of all to protect belongings from foreigners.”

Her video Turbulent (1998) employs the chador as the site for female agency in Iranian society: on the left panel a male singer in a white shirt, played by Azari, smugly sings a Persian song to an audience of passive men in white shirts; on the right panel the singer Sussan Deyhim, shrouded in a black chador, emerges from the shadows to belt out a piercing, hallucinatory song to an empty auditorium. Deyhim’s dissonant voice reverberates across the filmscape with such mystic power that it silences the nondescript men in the left panel.

Women swathed in black robes appear again in two further videos – Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000) – that together with Turbulent form a trilogy exploring gender and culture in Islamic society. After experimenting with further video installations, she embarked on making a feature-length film. This resulted in Women Without Men (2009), based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel of the same name, for which Neshat garnered the Silver Lion award for best director at the 66th Venice Film Festival. She is currently working on her second film, a non-traditional biopic of legendary Middle Eastern singer Umm Kulthum (1898–1975).

Neshat was born to an affluent family in Qazvin, a religious town in northwest Iran, and grew up with the chador even though the Pahlavi government did not impose the dress code on all women. Her father, a successful physician, was enamoured with the West and encouraged his children to be “Western”, sending them to a Catholic boarding school in Tehran. At seventeen she moved to the United States to study art at the University of California at Berkeley, and was stranded there by the Islamic Revolution in 1979. She moved to New York in 1983. She was only able to visit her hometown in 1990 after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, and was shocked by the ideological changes in her country.

I caught up with Neshat at her studio in Soho on a sweltering New York spring morning, to discuss her childhood, her life in exile, the Iranian Revolution, the chador, her new film project – and everything else in between.

The work that I started to do was about the Islamic Revolution and its relation to women. Obviously the veiling was a big part of it but I approached the whole concept on aesthetic, political, and cultural levels. My work is very stylised so the idea of having this woman in black and men in white shirts is beautiful to me. I really liked the visual but at the same time I knew that the veil was important in terms of understanding it as a symbol, and what it represented: the rejection of Western fashion and ideology, and a way of creating this sense of solidarity with Islam, and at the same time a symbol of repression for many women. So it became a very active symbol.

I went back to looking at art that comes from Iran, both Islamic and Persian art, where the integration of text and image is so common. If you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art you can see poetry or narratives in rocks, mosaics, or miniature paintings. I was looking at poetry written by women about the Revolution, and realised my images are the embodiment of those texts, and should go together. For me the texts have become a voice for the silent figures, and I enjoy that relationship because it plays with this idea of the image going back and forth between the present and the past, the lyrical and the political, and the intellectual and the emotional.

The subject of the orchard is significant in Islamic culture, and in the Middle East, because we come from a barren landscape. It has a physical, metaphysical, and spiritual meaning, and is often explored in our literature and mystical texts as a fragment of heaven. The garden has political ramifications as well, as a form of exile – a place where you escape from reality and the banality of everyday life. I use the orchard as an unknown space that gives refuge to women, but has its own logic where the inner life of women and the garden are both unworldly. I always look at the orchard as a more spiritual or sacred space, and the city as a more profane space.

That’s the challenge. It took many years to make Women Without Men, and that was the exact question we asked: how to find a balance between my own signature as a visual artist and traditional cinema, and not to make a film that’s an extension of my video installations. It’s this question of making a film that is commercially viable and comprehensible, and yet has an artistic value. It has to be experimental, and an auteur kind of film.

You’re working on a new film in Egypt. Can you tell me about it?

I’ve been working on a new film about the life and music of Umm Kulthum. She’s an iconic singer who was also a nationalist, and she was not only important in Egypt but all across the Middle East. Her music was known to have the power to throw people into a state of ecstasy, and she was also known for her efforts to bring peace and unity among Arabs. I’m obsessed with Kulthum because it’s so unheard of in that region, especially in that period: a woman achieving that legitimacy and legacy.

She was not a traditional woman, and was never a mother, and yet she became one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century in the region. I find that quite astonishing. She had that ability to reach somewhere so primal that it’s almost untouchable and was appreciated by both men and women, religious and non-religious people, the intellectuals, the elites and the working class.

We grew up in a normal, happy family until my father sent his children to a boarding school in Tehran. We lived in a beautiful old house in Qazvin that has a beautiful garden – a typical Persian garden like in miniature paintings [Neshat also explores the imaginary or allegorical orchard in many of her video and film works] – and I have vivid memories of a happy, happy childhood there with a lot of exposure to religion. My first experience with a real crisis was when I entered that boarding school in Tehran. I felt imprisoned, isolated, and desperately homesick. I had a strong physical reaction and had to be sent home, and once I went back to Qazvin, I was happy again – until my father decided to send me to the West.

My father believed that his daughters and sons should be highly educated, and he was big on Western culture. In Iran there was a limit as to how far one can go, and he had big dreams for his children. I appreciated his ambition for his children because it was not exclusively for his sons only. In fact I’m the only child who is still professionally active, along with one of my brothers. My other two sisters got married and became housewives, and one of my brothers passed away.

I never recovered from my initial psychological breakdown at the boarding school, this idea of exile – of separation anxiety – and I think my brother who passed away never recovered from that as well, and ultimately, sadly, throughout his life, he suffered from that memory. I’m not blaming our parents because that was how they responded to the situation in Iran at that time. But for me, coming to the US and being alone, and once again feeling the same separation anxiety – a lot of my work is about that intense sense of anxiety, of being an outcast, and being exiled – and now that I look back this is all rooted in my early years in the US by myself. So that may be good because otherwise I wouldn’t have been an artist – you have to suffer a little.

When I was in Iran things were already building up and I was very aware of the fact that there was this resistance movement against the Shah. I was also not unaware of a strong pro-Khomeini student movement from my own generation against the Shah. Later when I was in Los Angeles I was around a lot of activists who were active in the US. Eventually when the Revolution did happen, it was a force both exhilarating and frightening, and later became more frightening than exhilarating because the aftermath was very brutal.

 For me it was devastating. Unlike many Iranians abroad who have families or relatives they could stay with and receive support, I didn’t have anyone, and was still being financially supported by my father. For me it was not only the emotional, psychological, and political separation: it had a very devastating effect on me, and on my livelihood.

With the Islamic Revolution came this transformation where the government had a huge control over people, and I have always said that it was almost like a Communist country where there was a clear ideology that overruled everything, and that was the most shocking to me. Regarding the re-veiling of women, even before the revolution my grandmother always dressed like that, but suddenly it was mandatory, and that aspect of the change was quite shocking.

That has been my destiny. Most people on this planet have their own obstacles and personal crises that are beyond their control. We’re born into specific circumstances and we often underestimate how the foundation of who we are and how we operate is dependent on those early years, and it’s impossible to go back and fix it. Right? You just basically live with it for the rest of your life. It’s your constitution.