Shirin Neshat and Resistance in RES

Words: Holly Willis

Throngs of men, dressed in natty white shirts, and an undulating sea of women, cloaked in flowing black robes, move with gear-like synchrony, at once orderly and mismatched, in Shirin Neshat's dual- screen projection piece Rapture, currently on view at UCLA's Fowler Museum in Los Angeles.

The New York-based filmmaker, who came to the U.S. from Iran in the 1980s, has made a series of internationally acclaimed films designed for museum and gallery exhibition over the last five years, all of which reckon with poignant issues of diaspora, gender and cultural difference, the subject of the museum's "Elsewhere" film and video show.

Neshat's early visual work was in photography. Her first film was Turbulence, which she shot on 16mm black-and-white stock and exhibited on two separate screens positioned opposite each other. On one screen, a man enters an auditorium and sings a traditional song; when he finishes, on the other screen, a woman, dressed in the black chador worn by Islamic women, begins to sing, eschewing lyrics and proper rhythms in favor of passionate, inchoate sounds that move from deep tones akin to breathing, to chanting and unnervingly wild noises as the camera swoops around her in graceful circles.

"Turbulent became the beginning," explains the soft-spoken Neshat, sitting in the airy studio space of her Soho loft. "It was an opening to a whole new world in many ways, and an introduction to a cinematic experience, and to narrative. Turbulent has the picture of classical film, yet it doesn't obey the rules of cinema -- it becomes very participatory because the audience is divided, looking simultaneously at two screens. And I felt that this hybrid, mixing cinema and the visual arts, had very strong potential."

Exploring that potential became Neshat's focus over the next several years, and the result is a series of internationally acclaimed films centering on alienation and selfhood. Turbulent was followed by the double-screen piece Rapture, and then Fervor, also a dual-screen projection piece. Fervor depicts the chance encounter of a man and woman and their attempts to connect despite social restrictions that disallow contact. In Possessed, Neshat focuses even more intently on the experience of a woman, moving in close to examine her face, the camera circling in kinetic arcs. Pulse takes viewers into a woman's room to consider loneliness and alienation, while Soliloquy, which features the filmmaker herself, explores the division between East and West, old and new. Tooba, based on a myth from the Koran about a sacred tree, finds a link between the tree and a woman, while Passage, made in collaboration with Philip Glass, is a gripping portrait of grief. Her latest piece is about an interrogation.

"Somebody asked me recently, 'Why does your work always have to be about Iran? Why don't you make work about America?'" Neshat recalls. After much consideration, Neshat decided that it was simple: because her biggest personal dilemma centers on being part of a group but living in exile, ideas about roots, of belonging, "of finding a little place for myself," all became central. Researching, writing and filmmaking all contribute to the sense of still being a part of the group, despite the thousands of miles between America and Iran, and the murky cultural gulf that clouds ideas of Islam for American viewers.

"I think there's one element that's very important in the work," continues Neshat, "and that's the duality that exists between the self, which is me, and what runs through me as a person, as a woman, as an immigrant and all of the personal anxieties that I have, and then the larger issues, that are about everyone. So for me it's always about how to navigate between the private and personal and the public, and the rational versus the irrational. I don't think it's even something that I think about logically; it's something that I just do intuitively."

Neshat is also the first to point out that there is an element of insanity that hovers around the edges of her films. "Someone pointed out that in every film that I make, the woman runs away, or goes into the water, or commits suicide, or screams! In Possessed, she's actually mad. So I think there's a level of madness in all of these films, and I realized that's what I identify with. It's about me."

In this sense, Neshat's work shares a tendency with other contemporary videos by women, many of which feature female characters struggling to find a comfortable sense of identity among the conflicting and often incompatible expectations of a particular culture, class and ethnicity, not to mention the chaos of gender. The result is a kind of hysteria, a term that certainly has negative connotations, and yet, can also point to the radical uncertainty and instability at the heart of identity. Neshat's interest in the chador embodies some of the conflicts at the heart of this instability -- at times, the garment has been a sign of subjugation; at others, it has been a sign of resistance. And for Neshat, who admits that, as an artist she loves the sculptural form of the black fabric encasing the body, the chador also references all the ambiguities and complexities, both personal and political, at the heart of subjectivity.

Neshat's next project is a feature film, based on Iranian novelist Shahrnush Parsipur's book, Women Without Men. "It's a very beautiful story with a political message about the exiled community and ideas of utopia," says Neshat, "and yet it's very poetic and mystical, and very feminist. It's also very Iranian, but it's not about Iran." Will Neshat leave behind her exacting consideration of image and sound design in pursuit of a feature length story? "I want to stick with my own sensibility," she answers, adding by way of explanation, "The beauty of it is that it's magical realism...." Neshat, one of several artists eroding the boundaries between gallery and movie theater, promises to continue pushing the boundaries of both.

Rapture is currently screening at the Fowler Museum on the UCLA Campus (Sunset and Westwood entrance), thru July 27. Info: 310-825-4361.

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