© Shirin NESHAT
Untitled (Rapture series)
| Artist | Shirin NESHAT |
|---|---|
| Year | 1999 |
| Material/ Technique | gelatin silver print |
| Size/ Duration | H33 × W57.4cm |
| Copyright Notice | © Shirin NESHAT |
| Year of acquisition/ donation | 2000 |
| Description | Born in Qazvin, Iran in 1957. Lives and works in New York, USA. Shirin Neshat immigrated to the United States in 1974, and went on to study art at university. After graduating, she based herself in New York. In 1990 she returned to Iran for the first time since moving to America. Motivated by what she saw had become of her native land since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, she began work on a project that put a special focus on the circumstances surrounding women there. In 1993 Neshat showed her photographic series, “Women of Allah,” which deals with the subject of martyrdom. It depicts women wearing chadors with Farsi text written on the exposed parts of their bodies, such as their eyes and the palms of their hands. Since 1996 she has worked with video, beginning with a three-part series of audio and video installations – "Turbulent" (1998), "Rapture" (1999), and "Fervor" (2000). In 2009 her "Women Without Men" was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The museum has six of the series of 16 photos taken as a separate project from the video work when Neshat filmed the 1999 video "Rapture", which contrasts the stories of men and women by projecting them on two screens mounted on opposite walls. The work was inspired by a novel by the Iranian author Monir RAVANIPUR titled "Ahl-i-gharq" (The Drowned), an apocalyptic story about a small village. A group of men in white shirts and black pants gather together in a fortress and form a circle. A group of women swathed in black chadors appear out of nowhere in particular and gather in an expansive desert and assume a praying position, kneeling with heads deeply bowed towards the ground. While the men remain in the fortress, the women walk away from the desert towards the coastline pushing a boat in order to embark on a journey. The video transcends the issue of men and women in Islamic society, symbolically depicting the contrasts between order and chaos, conservatism and reformation, and culture and nature through the video’s clear black and white contrast and composition. The image of women boldly journeying into an unknown freedom in the midst of a vast natural landscape stands out all the more as it is combined with the effect of their black chadors. |
NOTES
This Collection Data page contains the works and materials in the collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, as of April 1, 2018.
Artists are listed alphabetically by artist’s surname.
Works and materials by the same artists are listed according to the date of the work in principle.
Works whose dates are unidentified are listed at the end of each item. Some works are not listed according to the date of work due to their relations.
The data of works and materials are listed in order of title, production year, material/technique/form, dimensions, donor’s name, copyright holder and credit for photograph.
Dimensions are given by height (H) x width (W) in centimeters for plane work, and height (H) x width (W) x depth (D) in cm for 3-D work. Diameter (Ø) is used for circular work.
For the name of country or city, the name currently used in English is listed in principle.