Shirin Neshat
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
©Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris.
Recently, I saw an exhibition by Shirin Neshat at the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont where we can see two amazing new color cinematographic videos entitled Munis and Faezeh, these two videos were of an enigmatic beauty rare in contemporary art today. Those of you who saw her work at MAM may remember how most of her videos were black and white, youtube her here if you want to catch a few reminders, but these new color films are color corrected in such a fine and delicate way that I was surprised and immersed in it… like a boy with cartoons… The colors were soft pastels colors. The subject matter of the two videos are based on Women Without Men, a novel by the Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipu depicting the perception of a young Iranian woman during the summer of 1953 in Iran’s political unrest and a psychological breakdown of a Muslim woman following a sexual assault. The two videos are stuning and remain in my mind even a few days later. I recommend you try to see this recent works when it comes to your town.
The new large scale photographs, some seen here below, which mainly feature portraits of middle east men and women have been hand tagged in Persian calligraphy. The large images take a position of a face to face confrontation with a culture that remains covered by the Media and rarely seen in contemporary art. I liked them!
