Shirin Neshat - 'Dreams Are Where Our Fears Live' | Tate

I grew up in a middle upper-class family in  a very conservative religious town in Iran and yet my father and my mother were not religious so we lived a double life in a way I always felt very conflicted between these two worlds   I remember we had a beautiful garden and one day  we were all sitting in the afternoon having tea   and I heard the quranic chants  and I started to burst into tears I don't know if it was that I enjoyed so  much that quranic chanting or was it that I   felt so anxious and worried that we are not  praying every day like everyone else. These emotions that built inside of me when I was  young led to the kind of art that I make. This was back in 1995. My work is  about my own experiences and emotions.   This idea of displacement being an outcast  being an outsider living inside yourself When I look back at my arrival in the  US I felt the same sense of displacement   I came in the late 70s at the age of 17 the  revolution happened a few years later so that   basically changed everything I was pretty much  disconnected from the rest of my family for a   long time to come. It was the most challenging  years of feeling isolated and displaced and not   quite relating to the American culture. In 1990 I took my young son and finally returned I got to see my family after 11 years. I found this obsession  of reconnecting and not wanting to let go. Making art was a way of maintaining  a connection with my country. I started with photography I made these very provocative images of the woman of Allah The integration text over the image comes from my interest in  Persian and Islamic art and architecture.  The subjects are very contemporary about the  revolution but the style and the technique goes   back to something very ancient and classical. A lot of people thought that these were religious texts   but they were always poetry that were written  by Iranian women and some of the poems actually   were what instigated the image itself. I came to understand how much my family had suffered.  Iran underwent a major transformation since the  revolution into a very strict religious country.  All the women with the black veil including my own  family even though the women seem very silent and   passive on the surface there's so much they want  to say and that is expressed through calligraphy. I do enjoy using my hands in writing calligraphy  and the labor that it takes but at the same time   I like to be a storyteller I can't believe this is 20 years ago this is the park in Turkey these are the crew camera person actually to be there it was really powerful it was very beautiful. I always had a love  affair with the moving picture at the very first   small exhibition I had I even experimented with  super 8 and video and the videos became like short   poems and the movies became a story. My earlier videos are composite double-channel projections   the audience is literally inside of  the artwork in conflict between two   separate projections they become  like the editors of the film Soliloquy stemmed from my own experience as an  Iranian in the US and it's the only video that I've been in. The main role was an Iranian woman  that was deeply conflicted between the two realms   I am the silhouette that doesn't quite blend in  the US or in Iran those two worlds are colorful   and I'm the only one that is in black  as an immigrant there's always this   great space between me and America but it's  always been the same way about me and Iran. My work has always been relating to Iran or in the  middle east but land of dreams addresses United States. This work is the most complex in terms of  trying to make a project that is simultaneously   still photography video and a feature like film  three different languages collapse into one. The story evolves around this very surreal  Iranian colony reviewing Americans photographs and   their dreams. A female Iranian protagonist my  alter ego goes every day to different households   and disguises herself as an art  student 'so sorry to bother you   I'm an art student and I have an assignment  to photograph people in their homes'   but once she's inside she asked them to share their latest dream "do you mind telling me your last dream?" "my last dream?" She enters their dreams and begins to see herself really   identifying with them the themes of our dreams  are very universal dreams are where our fears live   I realize she's collecting people's  fears because she's so fearful herself I have several scenes of the main protagonist  driving in America but listening to Persian music   and that defines my experience in this country  how many times I have gone through the same thing   feeling so sad the way I felt  in that garden when I was young So maybe that's what is about an artist   by getting closer to other people's  pain you cope with your own.

Channel: Tate

Views: 287,138

Rating: 4.9645395 out of 5

Keywords: Tate, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives, Art, Modern Art, Contemporary Art, British Art, ShirinNeshat

Id: M43QgkbOEv8

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021