Shirin Neshat

An exhibition of the work of Shirin Neshat, featuring photographs from her seminal series Women of Allah, and presenting her major film trilogy Turbulent, Rapture and Fervor.

This exhibition came at a time of enormous social transformation in Neshat’s native Iran. Returning for the first time to Iran in 1990, Neshat was deeply affected by her homeland’s radical transformation and resolved to return to working as a practising artist (a career she had put aside for years after completing her studies) to record her impressions of these changes.

In the work she has made since then, Neshat has referred to the social, cultural and religious codes of Muslim societies in general, and Iranian society in particular, and used recognisable symbols, like the veil, or chador, in a way that challenges attempts to interpret them too literally.

The exhibition included a selection of photographs from Neshat’s seminal series Women of Allah (1993-7) and presented her major trilogy Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000) for the first time in London. All three films focused on the polarity and dynamics between men and women in Islamic societies.