Land of Dreams

Roja is drawn from Neshat’s own recurring dreams, memories and desires. The work traces a young woman’s disquieting attempts to connect with American culture while reconciling her identification with her home country of Iran.

An intimate entrée into an Iranian woman’s private world. Here the renowned actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who like Neshat is from Iran, appears in a moment of solitude before a radio. In the film, she captivatingly sings a love poem by Rumi in the film, and this photograph is no less poignant, as she is captured within the beautiful and dramatic light that filters into her bare room.

On one wall, a singer delivers a passionate love song to a group of men. He is faced away from his audience, secure that his performance will be accepted and adored. On the opposite wall, a woman in a black chador stands silently throughout his song. Then something stunning happens…

Artist Shirin Neshat explains the film: “I was interested in how female singers are universally treated as objects of desire. At first, Cate looks gorgeous, but when she sings it’s a male’s voice. The audience heckles her, and she becomes confrontational. When the music comes back on, she does a seductive dance but her face is evil. For her final act of subversion, she takes off her hair and makeup and walks away. That part was Cate’s idea. Fuck the beauty.”

Against the tumultuous backdrop of Iran's 1953 CIA-backed coup d'état, the destinies of four women converge in a beautiful orchard garden, where they find independence, solace and companionship.

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

Her poetic two-channel video installation Tooba is based on the Koran, in which Tooba, the sacred tree of paradise, offers shelter and sustenance to those in need. Neshat's video places a woman within a groove in the trunk of a large fig tree, symbolising its soul. They stand, alone, in a stone-walled garden set in a mountainous landscape. Men and women draw near and enter the enclosure, seeking refuge, as the Tooba-woman disappears into the Tooba-tree. The piece is ambiguous. Who has agency? Is it the crowd, who 'invade' the garden or the tree-woman who draws them towards her like a magnet? Tooba is dedicated to Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipour, whose novel Women without Men concerns five women sojourning in a garden, one of whom is transformed into a tree.

In Sarah, 2016, it is a forest environment that becomes a site of haunting; mysterious and unknowable. The protagonist Sarah is played by Sara Issakharian, an Iranian-born artist.

A film within a film, "Looking for Oum Kulthum" is the plight of an Iranian woman artist/filmmaker living in exile, as she embarks on capturing the life and art of the legendary female singer of the Arab world, Oum Kulthum. Through her difficult journey, not unlike her heroine's, she has to face the struggles, sacrifices and the price that a woman has to pay if she dares to cross the lines of a conservative male dominated society.

Zarin is part of Neshat's full-length film Women Without Men, based on Shahrnoush Parsipour’s book about women’s lives after the 1953 CIA coup in Iran.