This thesis analyzes Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah photographs by exploring key socio-political events that have shaped Iranian history since the reign of Cyrus the Great, ca. 600 B.C. Since Neshat’s photographs have been largely intended for a Western audience, it is important to explore the concept of colonialism that has created East/West polarities and so greatly influenced our modern era. This paper intends to demonstrate that Neshat’s images perpetuate Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, which allocates the Oriental to an inferior position vis-à-vis his Occidental counterpart. For a Western audience, Neshat’s consistent use of the Muslim veil, illegible Persian calligraphy, and guns symbolizes Islam’s violence and degeneracy; additionally, these elements position the Muslim woman as a subaltern entity in an archaic society. As a result, the Iranian Muslim woman remains restricted by her social, cultural, and religious praxis, as well as by Neshat’s formal and contextual depiction of her.

The Iranian artist Shirin Neshat has been living in self-imposed exile since the late 1970s, as she chose not to return to her home country following the ‘79 Islamic Revolution. Through her works Neshat examines Iran before and after the revolution and follows political and civil transformations through strong photographs of women in her country of birth.  My own use of the term exile deals with the analysis of the state of exile in relation to artistic work as a globalized and underlying motivation for art and artists. The new definition of exile is analyzed in relation with the artist’s photographs and the verbal and visual statements. The verbal and visual photographs in the work of Neshat are related to the term exile through different allegories and metaphors that are to be found in lyricist Rumi’s classical poetry, the Bible and the Quran. The artist’s use of the visual photographs where women appear with hijab covering their hair and with weapons in their hands- in some pictures without any audience at all, in others decorated with different calligraphic texts- are combined with the verbal photograph which is created through music (song) and language. The verbal and visual statements complete one another in a united effort to visualize exile as a term, therefore every attempt to separate these two a part, will inevitably deprive the audience of the statement itself, which is in this case the psychoanalytical inner exile. One does not have to be outside her home to feel the state of exile; it can be felt mentally even if one is at home. The inner exile is a global experience. This form of exile is born when the community is categorized from two extremes, with one side of the equation possessing power and the other being classified as weak and ”the other”. I use the status of women in Iran as an example in my investigation, where women are at home but are still very much outside of it, alienated for their gender (sex).

abstract: Shirin Neshat is recognized as the most prominent artist of the Iranian diaspora. Her two photographic series, Women of Allah (1993-97) and The Book of Kings (2012), are both reactions to the socio-political events and the change of female identity in Iran. The search for Iranian identity has a long tradition in Iranian photography. Neshat's figures, with their penetrating gazes, heavy draperies, and body postures, make reference to nineteenth-century Qajar photography. Through various cultural elements in her artworks, Neshat critiques oppression in Iranian society. Neshat employs and inscribes Persian poetry to communicate contradiction within Iranian culture. To read Neshat’s photography, it is crucial to register her use of Persian language and historical poetry. Although the reading and understanding of the Persian texts Neshat inscribes on her photographs plays a fundamental role in the interpretation of her work, Neshat’s artworks are not entirely conceptual. The lack of translation of these included texts in Neshat’s exhibitions indicates a decorative use of Persian calligraphy. The Western eye can aesthetically explore this exotic Eastern decorative calligraphy. The formal qualities of Neshat’s photographs remain, even if the viewer is unable to read or understand the Persian texts. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Art History 2015