Interview: Iran’s foremost female artist tells Art Radar how she uses art to explore fundamental human truths.
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| Shirin Neshat in her studio, 2014. Photo by Christine Lee. Courtesy Art Radar. |
by Christine Lee, Art Radar
Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat and Christy MacLear, the Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, speak to Art Radar about the Foundation’s new One-to-One artist initiative, the current exhibition Our House is on Fire in New York City, and Neshat’s internationally acclaimed works on culture, gender and politics.
On 30 January 2014, New York visitors attended the opening of the exhibition Our House is on Fire, which showcased works by Shirin Neshat for the new One-to-One initiative. The project was created by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (RRF) to “support contemporary artists as they create work in the service of advancing human rights, cultural understanding, and international peacekeeping.”
The foundation selected Neshat as their first artist for this initiative. Known for photography, video installations and films on Islamic culture, religion and politics Neshat chose to travel to Cairo and conceive a new series of photographs depicting “personal and national loss” by Egyptians after the failed revolution for the initiative. The exhibition runs until 1 March 2014.
Rauschenberg’s legacy and how art can change the world
Could you tell Art Radar about the history of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation? When was the Rauschenberg Project Space founded and for what purpose?
Christy MacLear [CM]:
The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation was actually founded by Bob during
his lifetime. The Foundation was one of many ways in which the artist
was philanthropic – the others including grants he gave to artists in
emergency needs, his advocacy for artist rights throughout his life, and
his record of developing work to benefit causes such as the environment
or social justice. After Bob’s death, the Foundation received the
assets from his estate which expanded the role to now include: managing
his artwork and legacy; fulfilling a larger philanthropic programme; and
starting up a residency for artists of all disciplines on his estate in
Captiva.
The Rauschenberg Project Space used to be
a warehouse which stored artwork but sat largely under-utilised. We
converted it from a warehouse into a project space in order to pilot a
number of ideas, strategic directions, which the Foundation was
considering as we were developing our programmatic plan for how to serve
artists and our community best.
We wanted to test three things: what if
we mounted exhibitions of other artists inspired by the values which
exemplify Bob’s legacy? What if we used the project space to connect to
our Residency in Captiva? And finally, what if we allowed space to be a
benefit for our grantees? We have tested all of these ideas and some
have worked well – others less well – but all telling in how to serve an
understanding of Rauschenberg’s legacy and our community.
[CM]: The One-to-One initiative is an outgrowth of our Artist as Activist Award. The Board chose Shirin Neshat to receive this award [because] her work has had a profound impact on our global cultural understanding.
We supported her travel to Egypt to develop a new body of work with the intent of providing a platform for her voice and having an edition for sale to benefit a nonprofit of her choice. The richness of this project was unexpected – her studio assistant’s loss defining the soul of the work; the turbulence of Egypt during this moment in time, hence elevating the conversation; and finally, the chance to show the works in our project space pulling this whole narrative together.
What prompted the foundation to create this initiative? Why now?
[CM]: This programme relates directly to our mission. It shows how ‘Art can change the world’ by virtue of creating understanding across cultures and elevating the platform for an artist to speak about issues which matter most to them. Bob also was an artist who expressly wanted to be surrounded by other artists – in dialogue with them – so using the values which define his legacy to showcase those who follow in similar footsteps is a powerful agent for us.
What was it like working with Shirin Neshat?
[CM]: Shirin is the most gracious person. I have often called her the “quiet lion” when we speak of this project in our halls. She is gentle and honourable to all viewpoints, she has a soft melodious voice and a generous way of being with other people. She also has a fire inside of her which helps point out global truths and issues with a clear beacon of light. When she speaks her words are chosen, heartfelt but have the power and poignancy with the energy a lion’s roar. She is fearless and clear – she is centred and through this personal, almost spiritual clarity alters a discussion which most fashionably avoid for fear of division of audience. I am proud to imagine she is my friend after this project – out of my respect for her work and the values she lives by.
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| Shirin Neshat, ‘Our House Is on Fire’, 2013, photography series. ©Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Art Radar. |
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| Shirin Neshat, ‘Our House Is on Fire’, 2013, series. Image courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Art Radar. |
Shirin Neshat’s development as an artist
You grew up in Iran, and studied at University of California (UC), Berkeley. Could you describe your background and the development of your vision as an artist?
Shirin Neshat [SN]: Growing
up in Iran, I was always interested in art, but I had no idea about it
because where I lived, in a small Iranian town, I never had access to
any form of classic or modern art. In fact, my family has never entered
to this day an art museum. In general, in Iran the concept of visual art
is still a very new concept. I had the inclination to be an artist, but
it was childish and premature. When I came to UC Berkeley, I naturally
wanted to study art and signed up for undergraduate and graduate school.
It was then I quickly found that there was a naivete in my passion for
art.
My education, my time in school, was not
the most fruitful; I didn’t produce the best work mainly because I
didn’t have the mental capacity to create great work. So, I went to
school, but when I finished my education I abandoned art all together.
I went back to making art when I moved to
New York, after years of gaining a certain level of maturity and
intellectual capacity to have ideas that are worth expressing, and also
discovering my own aesthetic. My upbringing and my interest as a young
child in art and later my education in art have nothing to do with what I
do today. Since I finished my education that I really started to put
the dots together, and why I want to make art, and in what fashion I
want to make it. The beginning for me was 1990s, I was already 32 or 33
years old, not before then.
[SN]: I feel that to be
an artist, you have to have ambition, have something really urgent and
pressing, and I didn’t have that until then. But at the age of 32, I
finally had a chance to visit my country, not having been there for good
12 years. That visit had a profound impact on me. Not only I hadn’t
seen my family, I also did not have a sense of how it’s like to be in my
country after the Islamic revolution.
It was the subject of Islamic revolution
that really became compelling to me, as an Iranian who wasn’t there
while it happened in 1979. My return to art then was [because] I was a
mature person, and I had a subject matter that was very pressing for me
and very interesting – the Islamic revolution – and the way in which the
Islamic revolution transformed lives, but more specifically women’s
lives. My first body of work started with the photography series, Women of Allah (1993-1997), about the Islamic revolution.
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| Shirin Neshat, Untitled, “Women of Allah” series, 1996, RC print and ink. Photo by Larry Barns. Image courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Art Radar. |
Our House Is on Fire? A visual poetry of personal and national loss
Could you talk about the works in this exhibition, Our House Is on Fire? How did you select the individuals in the photographs? How did the works for this exhibition come about?
[SN]: About a year and a
half to two years ago I was approached by the Rauschenberg Foundation,
who initiated a project where they would invite an artist once a year to
come up with a concept. They would make a work of art that could be
sold, but the profit could benefit a nonprofit organisation that the
artist chooses. This is a real tribute to Rauschenberg’s legacy of
donating and participating in humanitarian projects and causes. I really
welcome the idea, I thought it was a wonderful opportunity.
Of course, I don’t produce work in this
country [the United States], most of my work takes place in the Middle
East, so I asked if I can develop an idea that takes place in Egypt
because I happened to be travelling to Egypt a lot for another film
project. They supported that idea and even the idea of donating the
money to charitable organisations in Egypt especially since there’s a
lot of need and a lot of poverty in Egypt.
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| Shirin Neshat, ‘The Book of Kings’, 2012, installation view. Image courtesy the artist, Gladstone Gallery and Art Radar. |
I went in October or November of 2012
with my collaborator, someone who always takes the photos for me, Larry
Barnes. I went with an idea to try to focus on the aftermath of the
Egyptian revolution in Cairo, the Arab Spring, because I already created
a series of works called “The Book of Kings” (2012) which mainly
captured the euphoric energy of the Arab Spring. Now with the sense of
defeat and despair that followed the revolution, I thought it would be
important to go into a series of photographs that show the aftermath.
Now having said that, at the same time
Larry had a personal tragedy where his young 22 year old daughter died
very suddenly, two months prior to our departure. So he was also
grieving, and this absolutely shadowed our journey because he is my very
close friend, his daughter grew up with my daughter, and we were both
grieving.
So it was a very emotional time for us.
When we arrived in Cairo and were trying to follow my first interest and
pursue the aftermath of the revolution, I realised that the most
significant topic in my mind was the subject of loss, whether it’s a
personal loss of a family who lost a child in the revolution or national
loss, the feeling of despair and depression felt in Cairo, in the
community, not just on the individual level.
So this way, I could even connect Larry’s
sorrow with the Egyptian sorrow, and the universality of this kind of
sorrow that transcends our differences, our class, national background,
our age.
I have also decided that since the
earlier works were about young people, the youth who brought the
revolution. I wanted to now photograph older people who were the family,
who suffered a lot, who weren’t the activist themselves but [felt] the
consequence of them. So we set up a studio in downtown Cairo, in a
not-for-profit organisation, and I reached out to an elderly who worked
there and who spoke English, and basically asked him to help me
facilitate introduction to some of people who are quite poor and on the
street level. I wanted to capture people who were not so privileged.
As I started, we brought these people who
were mostly 65 and above, and extremely poor, and gave them a little
bit of money and a very wonderful exchange between human to human
happened, and we told them stories including Larry’s story and asked
them if they could share some personal tragedies. It was almost like a
documentary except the camera was running, and we didn’t ask them to
really talk about it but rather show in their gaze the emotions.
[SN]: Yes, we discussed
the ideas with them, but we didn’t want them to necessarily talk about
it if they didn’t want to. Some people did anyway, and some people
didn’t but regardless, every single one of them had some sort of a
personal narrative of loss.
[SN]: Many of them lost
children. And the ones that rang a bell to me the most, because we
photographed women and men, the women were much more expressive in terms
of crying really loud. Two of the women lost children in the revolution
and the others lost young children at some point.
A lot of them, it was combined pressure
of being extremely poor, barely having any access to medical health, and
on top of it having these political issues on their back. So it was a
really heavy burden on them from every dimension. Even if you look at
the revolution, the majority of the people protesting were probably not
the rich people. I’m sure there are some too, but like soldiers,
majority of the people who fight, who are unafraid, don’t have much to
protect or lose.
It was very painful to see that these
people have been hit at from every dimension, and on top of it they were
aged, so they really felt the passage of time so there was this
existential pressure as well as emotional. It was really devastating. My
friend who is the photographer is in his 70s, and he was also older and
every time one of the people would come and cry, he would also cry, and
I would cry so there was this intense humanity. I just have to say that
we forgot about art and were in this experience that became above and
beyond what we were working on.
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| Shirin Neshat, ‘Our House Is on Fire’, 2013, photography series. Image courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Art Radar. |
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| Shirin Neshat, ‘Our House Is on Fire’, 2013, photography series. ©Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Art Radar. |
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| Shirin Neshat, ‘Our House Is on Fire’, 2013, photography series. Image courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Art Radar. |
Capturing emotion and moving audiences
In general, is it the emotional aspect that inspires you to create your works?
[SN]: I think in
general, my works are emotional, and I think it communicates to the
people in a way that it moves them. I’m not a documentary person so even
if their story moves me, I would have been able to make a work that on
its own didn’t move people. I had to, in the end, create artworks that
transferred that experience from my subjects to the audience. It wasn’t
something that I can write about, put their voices or make a film about,
so I had to make sure that the way I photograph them, the way I talk to
them, I was able to capture their pain, and it was going to be the tool
to talk to the audience.
So yes, it had to be an artistic tool to
get that out as a way of communicating. I think, to be very honest, in
all of my work, there is that intention of making work that while it
could have so many dimensions, political, moral, existential dimensions,
it has to have an emotional dimension. I cannot make, it may be my
cultural background, but I really like things that move me, and I like
to move other people.
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| Shirin Neshat, ‘Our House Is on Fire’, 2013, photography series. Image courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Art Radar. |
[SN]: You are right in
the sense that particularly in the “Women of Allah” series, which was
the Islamic revolution, I reduced my use of the bodies to the hands,
feet and the face really. In women under the veil those are the only
things that can be exposed. I found tremendous possibilities through
very few parts of the body, how you can be so expressive.
Through a simple gaze, hand or feet of a
Muslim woman, so much can be told. We can often use body language in
terms of movement, which can be very expressive. The bottom of the feet
interested me particularly because it’s rather taboo in Islamic
countries to show the bottom of your feet, which is the dirtiest part of
the body. Yet, when people die, the images we see a lot even in Egypt,
after a military attack, were rows of men who died, and rows of feet
with just a tag between their toes. It was devastating to me that
ultimately that’s what remained – they covered the body, and the tags
became your identity.
[SN]: For me, the images
of these feet became unforgettable, of young men who were revolutionary
who were killed, and at the end their feet were in a tag that
identified them. So in the context of this exhibition and context of why
these people are crying, you have to have something that connects it to
the political references, that this is partially outside of their own
control.
[SN]: It’s been my
signature to use text over the body, mainly because I find this
aesthetically very wonderful. Aesthetics is also a very big part of
classical Islamic art, the way that text and image are often integrated
in Islamic architecture, Persian miniature paintings, even crafts – in
carpets, dishes, there’s this perpetual integration of text and image.
I guess somewhere in my past I was
inspired, and yet within my themes when people are so introverted and so
silent, the writing gives them kind of a voice and an intellectual
strength. It’s a voice. Like in my videos, the music becomes the voice,
here the poetry becomes the voice. But also in both cases, the poetry
[or] the song adds an emotional dimension to the work that neutralises
the political dimension of the work.
Of course, the theme of the poetry
changes from series to series. For this series, I used a particular type
of literature that’s revolutionary, people who described the chaos,
poets in Iran who are describing similar images as it’s happening in
Egypt. I translated one poem, “A Cry” by Mehdi Akhavan Sales, in the
exhibition, just to give one example, to let the audience know the kind
of literature that I’ve been using. The poems are by contemporary poets,
some who have died recently but poets who are iconic in the Iranian
community.
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| Shirin Neshat, ‘Speechless’, 1996, gelatin silver print and ink. Image courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Art Radar. |
[SN]: It’s interesting
because I’m not the kind of person who is extremely well read, but from
the beginning since I started making art, the thing that has inspired me
the most, that has provoked my visual imagination has been literature.
Either poems or novels that I’ve read and loved.
In the beginning with the “Women of
Allah” it was poetry. Then when I got into movie and video making, it
became novels, but all by Iranian women writers, some of whom I was not
only fascinated by their literature but who they were as people. And
their position as women, feminists, mothers, as intellectuals, I just
found them fascinating, and as I went into movies, Women Without Men, which was based on a magic realist novel by Shahrnush Parsipur.
Now I’m working on a ballet piece with the Dutch National Ballet on the Shakespeare’s Tempest,
which is an up and coming new work. Iranian people have a strong
affinity with poetry, more than other countries that I know. Iranian
people depend on reading poetry to transcend time. They had difficult
periods in history and Iranian people express themselves in poetry, and
also read a lot of poetry almost as a philosophical guidance, so I think
it comes naturally for Iranians. This passion and desire for both
reading and also expressing themselves with literature.
Some of the writers I’m interested in are very visual; for example, Women Without Men
is a visual realist novel. It’s a very visual novel. One poet whom I am
obsessed with, Forough Farokhzad, she is no longer alive, but her
poetry is extremely visual. And she wrote in metaphors, like when she
talks about the garden, she is talking about the woman. She has this way
of describing things that are visually tangible, so often I think my
photographs are an embodiment of her poetry.
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| Shirin Neshat, ‘Rapture Series’, 1999, gelatin silver print. Image courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Art Radar. |
[SN]: These three works you’ve mentioned create a trilogy. It was my fascination at the time because Turbulent was made in 1998, Rapture in 1999, and Fervor
in 2000. They were made rather quickly. It was a very lyrical trilogy,
it was not a documentary, and it was highly stylised, and fictional. It
was essentially about how men and women are treated in a radically
different way in the Islamic world, and more specifically, it was about
the Iranian society, and how women, as opposed to men, are pressed up
against the wall. The women are deprived of so many things that men are
not deprived of, and because they are so pressed up against the wall it
has made the women confrontational and strong. In every one of these
themes, you see the man versus the woman. The men are doing conformist
things, and it’s the women who are breaking the rules. Every single
time, it’s the woman that does something radical. So for me, it was
symbolically referring to reality in a sense about how incredibly
rebellious and defiant Iranian women are despite what has happened to
them in their country. And I think again, I love how through fiction,
you can hint at reality. I think, it’s my belief that in the Iranian
society, the women are up against the wall much more than men, but
consequently, women are much stronger and tougher.
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| Shirin Neshat, ‘Women Without Men’, 2005, c-print. Image courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Art Radar. |
Depicting lives of Iranian women in the 1950s through film
Your first feature film, Women Without Men (2009), based on a novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, is made up of stories of four women – Munis, Faezeh, Fakhri and Zarin – set in 1950s Iran. Could you tell us a little about why you chose to depict the lives of these four women?
[SN]: Originally, the
project started out as a feature film, but I knew that because I am a
visual artist that I was very interested in pursuing an art component to
the film. I’m very interested in cinema, and I wanted to do a film
purely for theatrical release, and had that kind of narrative
development, language, and all the pacing that is necessary for the
people to comprehend it for mass culture. But I also wanted to see if I
could create a series of video installations, which was eventually
created and exhibited in museums where the film was actually broken into
characters.
Each character had their own video, [and]
although the videos were short they conveyed the nature of the
character, their conflicts, aspirations but all without language and
editing and the way of telling was very different than the one created
for cinema. It ended up being a feature length film and five videos
about each character, and one of those characters was eliminated for the
feature film, she was far too magical.
One of the reasons that I was interested
in making the film about this book was the choice of characters. The
writer, I think, did an amazing job of creating a narrative. Every woman
came from a completely different socio-economic class, and with a
different kind of a problem.
We had the character, Fakhri, who was
very wealthy, very westernised, and her interests were completely
narcissistic. Then you have the two women, Munis and Faezeh who came
from middle-class, religious families, who were really inundated with
all sorts of taboos and question of oppression by the family who were
very religious. One of them wanted to be politically active, but her
family didn’t want her to do that. The other character just wanted to
get married, but she got raped and she was so religious that it
destroyed her. And the fourth character was from the lower class: Zarin
was a prostitute [and] had no choice but to become a prostitute because
of her childhood, yet she was going mad from all the guilt and shame. So
I love the fact that through different characters, you can travel
through different socio-economic classes and show Iranian society at
different facets during 1953. So, that was one of my attractions, and I
tried to stay truthful as much as possible to the idea behind the
original writer’s story.
[SN]: That book is about
Iran in 1953 before I was born, and she wrote this novel in the 1990s.
But yes, it was inspired by what she knew. She was born there, but she
was very young. That is a very interesting period of Iran, before the
revolution when we were a cosmopolitan society, and we also had the
problem of British and American involvement, and politically it was also
a very difficult time. Although the story is magical realism, the
writer recognised that this is a very rare period in Iranian history
that has not really been talked about very much whether through
literature or film. My film became unique in a way that it tried to
capture and depict that period.
[SN]: That’s the thing
about filmmaking, and I am doing that right now with the next film. It
involves a tremendous amount of research, years and years of collecting
archival footage and photographs. We had to research the architecture of
the time to interior design, the women’s costumes for four different
characters that came from different socio-economic class. We had to look
at the music that was used at the time, and all of this had to be done
in Morocco because we couldn’t shoot in Iran, so it was really a major
undertaking.
[SN]: I love that
process. I’m glad you asked because it’s almost unimaginable how much
work it takes to make a movie, especially a period movie, especially
with the small budget that we have. But it’s extremely satisfying
because it’s a real process as opposed to an art process, studio work
where you stand in front of a wall and do whatever that comes out of
your stream of consciousness. This is a process that requires so much
detail and information, even gathering that, it takes a lot of patience
but it becomes very addictive, and I really love that process because
you actually feel like you are learning, learning and learning. As hard
as it was to make the film, I have to say that it was one of the most
satisfying artistic experiences I’ve had.
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| Shirin Neshat, ‘Women Without Men’, 2009, feature film still. Image courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Art Radar. |
Country as character
What would you like the audience to take away from viewing the film Women Without Men?
[SN]: I am an artist who
is most interested in allegorical messages. I am not interested in
making works that tell people what to think or how to feel, rather for
them to be able to have an open interpretation. In this film, clearly,
the way the film was created, visually, narratively, in the way we
followed the woman, and their plights; equally, we followed the country
and their plights. We tried to make the audience feel that the woman and
the country were the same thing. They were all looking for an idea of
freedom, and the country became the fifth character. I think it’s
basically, as said in a beautiful voice over at the end, “all we wanted
was an idea of change.” Now that change can be personal or national. I’m
very interested in connecting the individual to the community,
connecting the personal and social, and this has been my interest
forever.
Underlying all of my work where I can
tell a single individual’s pain, but it’s really about national pain. In
the same way that we pursued every woman; what is their problem? What
kind of solution are they looking for? What is their transformation? We
did the same thing with the country of Iran. What is happening? What are
their problems? What are they looking for? And what is the ending? And
in the end, it was the same, both the woman and the country wanted
independence, freedom and change. To me, that was the most poignant
message of the film.
[SN]: I feel there are
many artists that make movies, and I think different artists when they
approach cinema make different decisions. Either they go so much towards
the conventional narrative film that they forget that they are artists,
or they make such artistic films that it can’t be treated as a
theatrical release. So my idea is to bring my strength as a visual
artist and yet open up to the idea of the cinematic language and meet
cinema halfway. And in Women Without Men, we truly did that
where every single frame of the picture was a photograph. I was really
lucky to be able to work with a great cinematographer who was able to
capture that.
[SN]: No, the producers
introduced me to the cinematographer who was Austrian. The Iranian
cinematographer that we were hoping to work with couldn’t work with us
because of how controversial I am. So it was a blessing because [the
Austrian] was young, very eager, very experimental. Actually, I want to
work with him again because he really understood what is like to make
art with movie making. I think he said this is the most visual film that
he’s made. I hope to work with him on my next film, The Voice of Egypt, on musician Oum Kulthoum.
[SN]: I think the film
was a real original film. It’s not a masterpiece, it’s not a perfect
film. It’s got a lot of flaws, but it’s not like any other film. It
really stands out on its own, again, for the fact that I don’t come from
cinema, and I have this naïve relationship. It has a kind of a fresh
look to filmmaking. But perhaps it’s still too obscure for some people,
but the award was given for the direction it took, and for the
confidence it took to be what it is.
[SN]: Well, I go back
and forth, and in the middle of making these photographs, I made a video
with Natalie Portman which was totally outside of these parameters. In
fact, you don’t even know where the source of this culture is. It’s all
in nature and very psychological, so I think it’s interesting.
Consistently in my work, I always seem to have a footing in deeply
socio-political work as an Iranian and someone who responds to
socio-political realities that affect me directly. I also seem to thrive
on works that are totally existential and have nothing to do with race,
culture and gender etc. I seem to go back and forth, and I must say
that the Arab Spring movement had a profound effect on me and the
Iranian community, so I did feel compelled to pay tribute to this
patriotism. Also, it must be having made so many films, I was becoming
nostalgic for studio work, when I can use my hands. Now, I’m becoming
nostalgic for making films and video so I sort of go back and forth in
switching mediums.
[SN]: Well the thing is I
was not forced to exile, and there’s a finality to that that I’m not
comfortable with. It’s more of a self-imposed exile. I’m more
comfortable with [that term], and there is truth in it. I haven’t been
back since 1996, but it’s probably not a very good idea for me to go
back. It’s more of a personal choice, yet there’s a reality that the
realm of politics forced on us that we don’t have many choices in, and
this is not unique to me. I wish that like many people I could go home,
visit my family, visit where I came from, but that choice is absent so I
have to deal with it. But it’s not like the government has me on a
blacklist. So for me, I would say it’s a self-imposed exile but in a
way, in reality, it’s also has had advantages. I’ve learned to work
nomadically, I’ve learned to be very independent, I tend to be very
global in thinking, I belong to the world. So I lost a sense of purity
of belonging. I go to Egypt, I go to Morocco, I go to Mexico. I think
that nomadic is a better word than exile. In fact, who knows, maybe I
can go back tomorrow, but I will still continue to be nomadic. I am not
able to be fixated in one place.
[SN]: It’s been very
interesting as I am now in the middle of collaborating with a dance
choreographer. It’s the Dutch National Ballet, doing The Tempest.
I think every time you have a new beginning, it’s like the same feeling
of being thrilled but also really scared because this is an audience
you are not familiar with, a language you are not familiar with. So
again, it’s how to break down a story, without using any language. So
I’m working together with the choreographer and video.
The choreographer, who is originally
Polish, is the chief choreographer in the Dutch National Ballet and also
the Warsaw National Ballet, and he approached me to collaborate with
him one day. At the time, I was like, “ballet?!” For years he kept
pursuing [me], and we met in Europe and I said “why not?”
We started to choose the story; The Tempest
is about exile, colonialism, and it’s a fantastic story about storms
but also a psychological space of men who are kind of in a space of
exile. It’s just a fantastic story that can have a Middle Eastern twist
to it. So, with the dramaturgist, also my husband who is involved in it,
we broke down the story, we tried to read it, tried to understand and
visualise it, and slowly it became a reality.
Right now, it’s opening in June of 2014
in Amsterdam. I’m extremely nervous but super excited because it’s
asking a completely different artistic attention from me. It’s very
technical. It’s a two-hour programme, and I have to keep in mind the
music, the dancers, the set, and all the different screens we have, so
it’s a very tedious project, but I enjoy it a lot. The way we are
approaching it is trying to picture a relationship between what is
happening on stage versus what is happening on video. Dance is so
abstract, it’s all body movements, but with a video we can complete the
narratives in a way for the audience to give more hints on the
development of the story. Although there wouldn’t be a language, what we
are doing with the dancers is [discovering] how the two things are able
to work together to tell a story and have an aesthetic power. It has to
be visually engaging.
[SN]: I am working on the film about Oum Kulthoum. It reminds me so much about the Women Without Men
film and the challenges we had. The film is very epic, very ambitious.
It’s a period film. Again it’s a story about the relationship between
the country and a woman artist, in the way that we can tell the story of
the country through this woman. There’s this connection between art and
politics, and mysticism through her music which is so fantastic and the
political turmoil in the country, the revolutions and war. There’s a
softness to the film because it’s so lyrical and so wonderful, but it’s
going to be hardcore and brutal because it’s on revolutions and war.
It’s already been already four years working on this film, and I truly
believe that we will shoot this film, if not late 2014 then some time in
2015.
[CM]: In
the past month, we hosted ten artists at the residency representing the
Middle East as well as the United States (as it relates to Shirin’s
show). These artists are a part of the ten artists every four to six
week cycles in Captiva. In the coming month, we will be announcing a
programme where Rauschenberg works will be pulled into the holdings of
some of our country’s greatest museums. This is a wonderful announcement
as we ensure broad access to Bob’s work.
It is the spirit of Bob’s work and his
generous nature which defined this wonderful programme which Shirin has
graciously participated in. We are thankful for her voice and for
opening our eyes.
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