Shirin Neshat

When I look at this exhibition, it’s as if I’m looking at my own life. It tells the story of my journey as an Iranian who has lived far from her homeland. It took a lot of work. I have lived a long life, and much of my early work looks at Iran, like the Women of Allah series, Turbulent, Rapture, Fervor. Even here, I continue to look at Iran, asking myself many questions to which I have no answers.

Nothing—absolutely nothing in this exhibition can be seen outside the fact that it is the perspective of a single person. It is not pure fiction, and in no way does it represent Iran or Iranian society. I am very interested in history, political reality, feminism, and the question of religion. My work is deeply personal, but it is not autobiographical.

It was born from a desire to question religious fanaticism—how any religion can shape people’s minds to the point of making them accept violence, cruelty, and even death. That project sought to explore the phenomenon of a small group of women who voluntarily became militants and embraced the idea of violence. These images, on one hand, speak of love, sacrifice, and compassion, but on the other, they also reveal brutality and violence.

For me, photography has always been connected to portraiture—to the ability to capture, in a single image, the emotions and expressions of an individual through simple gestures of the body.

Unlike photography, video allows me to include landscapes, choreography, actors, music, and set design. It gives me the possibility to tell stories in a different way, offering the audience a broader experience compared to a single image. But videos, just like photographs, always deal with the theme of duality. For example, in Turbulent, we see a woman breaking all the rules of music and ultimately triumphing. Injecting this idea into a short video was crucial for me. Videos have opened up a new horizon for me—the realm of storytelling.

Yes, that’s true. In recent years, I have stopped obsessively focusing on Iran. I have lived in the United States longer than anywhere else in the world. So, starting with Land of Dreams and The Fury, my perspective has shifted: the main character is still an Iranian—often myself—but the stories are no longer solely about Iran. In Land of Dreams, for instance, a photographer goes door to door in Mexico, collecting people’s dreams. Something has changed within me. As long as I am Iranian, my art will inevitably maintain a connection to Iran, but I no longer feel the need to tell only that story, especially now that I no longer return there. This has been a significant transformation for me.

Letting go of the idea that I always had to speak about Iran has been incredibly liberating. Working with people in America, filming on the streets of New York and in New Mexico, observing what is happening in the U.S. today, and understanding how my voice—as an Iranian immigrant—might be more important than ever, even for my own country, has completely transformed my approach. Now, my focus is on America. The faces you see in Land of Dreams represent humanity as a whole. It no longer matters where we come from. We are all connected by the fear of violence, war, and genocide. Pain surrounds all of us, everywhere, and for me, it no longer makes sense to speak only about Iran.

Yes, because for me, it is a portrait of the United States. I shot these images in 2019, when America was still a place of diversity, of immigrants, of people from every ethnicity, religion, and social class. In these images, I wanted to capture that vision—Hispanics, Native Americans, Black people, White people, the poor, women, men. That was my perspective on America. But today, that idea is changing dramatically. And for me, this series has become a portrait of a nation in transformation.

I am an artist, and I belong to the world. You cannot separate art based on an artist’s ethnicity or religion—it’s irrelevant. Fanaticism exists in Judaism, in Christianity, not just in Islam. I realize that, as an Iranian in exile, I no longer belong to any place, and I have no obligation to ideological purity. Today, we can no longer afford to remain confined within national boundaries because the issues we face are absolutely global.