Shirin Neshat - The Art of Hope

“...the knowledge that literature gives us: it enlarges our sense of human experience beyond the narrow limits within which we live our own lives, it takes us imaginatively into lives and parts of the world far different from our own. It can give us understanding of others unlike ourselves, and possibly opens us to caring.” 

 -Theory of Knowledge Textbook

Hmm. I don't have much thoughtful stuff to post lately. I only post events usually which are mostly half-baked because I don't have the time to polish them to perfection. Hence I shall post up something I wrote for my TOK (Theory of Knowledge) class. It's something like thinking skills, or perhaps a little of philosophy, and to me it's kinda boring at times because I'm not interested (although I do like theoretical abstract philosophy stuff). 

So for this assignment we had to choose a particular work of art and relate it to the quote above. Note: I chose the first photograph to write an essay on. Subsequent photographs are used as dividers for blocks of text only. So all the references will be made toward the first photograph.

Here's my piece:

I have selected photography, in particular Shirin Neshat's photography of Middle Eastern women and their lives. Photography is the most realistic work of art one can get to reality, and to be able to accurately capture the moment, a photographer not only has to perfect his photography skills such as controlling the amount of light that goes into the camera and the angles he has to shoot from, he has to also be quick in pressing the shutter, lest the moment is gone. It is unlike art, where the subject can be there for as long as the artist wants, or like theatre and dance, where the performances are practised to perfection. Photography is, for most of the time, a matter of a couple of seconds.

Having said that, there are also portrait and landscape photography, where the subject will not be gone in a flash, but the techniques to capture the desired feel. War photographers and photographers working in other countries bring us pictures of knowledge: from the photographs, we can see the vibrancy of other cultures, the sufferings of war-stricken countries, and the differences between each and every part of the world. Through actual situations captured in frames, we can understand the world further—how others live, work and play, and this brings us closer to them without even stepping foot on their home soil.

The reason for choosing Shirin Neshat's photograph to elaborate further on the quote above is due to her poignant, often stark representations of Middle Eastern women and their sufferings. She is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York, and her works are mainly on film, video and photography. Unlike other Middle Eastern families, Neshat's parents had modern and westernised views, and her father encouraged her daughters to be an individual and to see the world, and Neshat was sent to college along with her siblings. When she returned to Iran after her studies, she was appalled at the change in Iranian culture, which serves the basis of her future artworks.

Her earliest works were photographs, for example the Unveiling from 1993 and Women of Allah from 1993-1997. Her photographs explore feminism themes related to Islamic views, especially those in Iran. To cope with the differences between the culture she was raised in and the one she experienced much later after the Iran Revolution, she developed a series of portrait photographs of women, on which the visible parts of their bodies (such as faces and hands) were entirely inscribed with Persian calligraphy. The interesting part about her photographs is that Neshat is not the photographer; rather, she is the model in the photos, posing for the pictures. Her photographs are taken by a Cynthia Preston, in shades black and white, and she would overlay them with Farsi text afterward.

In the photograph attached, the Muslim woman in the picture is looking straight at the camera, armed with a long thin stick as if defending herself. However, she is still wearing traditional, plain black clothing that almost fully covers herself, and the posture can be interpreted as a univesal sign for silence. Her gaze, while brave enough to stare directly at the lens, looks like she has given up and is tired. The paradox in the photograph suggests that beneath the surface, the reality is far more complex. Her face is completely over-written with text from poetry by contemporary Iranian female poets on the subject of the role of women in the Revolution. This gives the photograph a sense of hope: that despite strict and unfair restrictions on women, there is still hope through literature by women poets of the country.

Through the photographs, I have come to appreciate not only the technical beauty of photography, but also my own feelings and interpretation when I look at them, not to mention the intentions of the artist and the photographer in offering these artworks to the world. The difference between Iranian culture and Malaysian culture is a world apart, hence my knowledge through the photos expands beyond where I live. I have come to understand more about the culture of Middle East, especially on their women, and this has helped me immensely on one of the books I am also doing for the World Literature component in English HL in the IB. The interest to know further has also motivated me to find more information about it online, and as the culture there is far more restrictive than Malaysian culture on social norms, I also begin to appreciate my own country's culture.