***** Radical History Review 86 (2003) 183-192 After-Images of a Revolution Negar Mottahedeh
Shirin Neshat, Women of Allah (1994), Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999), Fervor (2000).
Gita Hashemi, Of Shifting Shadows: Returning to the 1979 Iranian Revolution through an Exilic Journey in Memory and History, Exisle Creations, 2000, CD-ROM.
...When Neshat first returned to Iran in 1990 after the Iranian Revolution, she found herself both shaken and stimulated by the ideology that had gripped her country of birth. 1 The outcome of her multiple visits thereafter -- a series of photographs and film installations -- reflects on questions of gender and identity under Islamic rule: "I found them [women] to be the most potent subjects, in terms of how the social and political changes caused by the revolution affected their lives, how they embodied this new ideology, and how they were managing to survive the changes." 2 Hence women, and often veiled women in public spaces, became the focus of her installations, creating images that could, if evaluated uncritically, feed into and proliferate stereotypical representations of Middle Eastern cultures not unlike earlier traditions of orientalist art.
Her first still work, most notoriously serialized as Women of Allah (1994), portrays female figures whose photographed bodies bring together text, veil, and weapon. The concepts that enter the frame are in total conflict: the veiled female body, often stereotyped in Western discourses as submissive, illiterate, and backward, not only speaks here but it speaks both poetically and with arms. As Jonathan Goodman writes: "The gun barrel pointing out between a pair of beautiful feet in Allegiance with Wakefulness (1994) is a powerful corrective to the notion of Iranian women as passive beholders of political change. A poem is written on the soles [of the feet], an excerpt reads 'I pray for you guardian of the liberating Revolution.' The image makes an ambiguous statement, one calculated to disturb our presuppositions about her [Neshat's] stance." 3 Invested in its rigid presuppositions about the limited number of possible interpretations available for understanding the repercussions of the Islamic revolution, much of the Iranian expatriate community criticized Neshat's work for constructing stereotypical images of Iranian women and creating art that was in support of the repressive Islamic regime and its warring tendencies. Neshat moved on from photography to look for a universal, plural thematic that would intersect with the specifically Iranian cultural motifs that captured her interest. Her work for the screen shows this effort in its attempt to engage with a poetic language that is at once minimalist and humanist, in the spirit of director Abbas Kiarostami's work, but that is also uniquely powerful in its investments in the questions raised by the category of gender.
The conflicting concepts once brought together in a single image in her black-and-white photography moved now to the gallery screen. In Neshat's Turbulent (1998), two screens facing each other project distinct oppositions. The screens' separation across a gallery floor reflects the dichotomies of gender relations in musical performances in Iranian society. Shoja Azari, Neshat's longtime collaborator, dressed in white, acts the part of a conservative male singer (Shahram Nazari's music dubs the scene), invoking the poetry of the thirteenth-century Sufi, Rumi. He faces a packed auditorium. His music, considered acceptable by the current regime, maintains the status quo. The camera mimics this stance and remains motionless throughout the scene. The opposite screen shows Sussan Deyhim, Neshat's other longtime collaborator, dressed in black, singing her own part. Contrary to the male singer, Deyhim has her back turned to an empty theater and in singing breaks every rule. The camera encircles her as she performs a bizarre series of primal vocalizations, songs, and cries. The empty theater suggests a public's common adherence to the law that forbids women to perform solo under the rule of the Islamic Republic.
This piece, like the two others that make up this series, works through the gender dichotomies structuring most societies, Middle Eastern or not (male-female, fixed-moving, traditional-unconventional, white-black). Oppositions are the axes around which her work revolves.
Rapture (1999), which explores additional dichotomies, is inspired by the novel Ahl-i Ghargh [Being brave enough to drown] by Moniru Ravanipur. The novel tells of a day when the sky turns black, when the seawater floods the town folk's homes, and men, hapless and panic-stricken, flee, leaving the town's women abandoned with their children. The women drum, dance, and pray to halt the onslaught of disaster. The novel celebrates women's mystical abandon and bravery. Rapture partially reproduces Ahl-i Ghargh. Two black-and-white screens, one populated by one hundred women, the other by one hundred men, and projected on opposite walls of a small gallery space, pitch the dichotomies of male and female against each other.
The men
-- engage in senseless acts, move an object about as they march -- do ablutions for prayer -- walk about in orderly fashion in an enclosed fortress and then in circles -- watch and wave, as if to the women on the opposite screen.
The women
-- engage in acts of prayer and ululation -- stare out as if in amazement at the men -- disperse and walk through the desert -- carry a boat to the sea -- board the boat and sail off....
Negar Mottahedeh is an assistant professor of film and literature at Duke University. She received her doctoral degree from the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Her thesis focused on the history of visual productions in nineteenth-century Iran. Her works have appeared in Camera Obscura, Iranian Studies, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She is currently working on a monograph on national variations in cinematic language and the new Iranian cinema....
Gita Hashemi, an Iranian artist who has been living and working in the U.S. and Canada, has been actively involved in bringing art to politics. Working on a range of issues from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the "war on terror" in Afghanistan, she has been involved in several projects such as Creative Response, a team of artists, writers, and educators working against the occupation of Palestine (http://creativeresponseweb.net) and the Post Exile Collective's "The Word Room," where surfers are encouraged to record their responses to the current tragedies of war (http://www.wordroom.net). Hashemi has also helped co-curate the "Trans/Planting -- Contemporary Art by Women from/in Iran" exhibit (see a review of this exhibit in Radical History Review 82, winter 2002). But in Of Shifting Shadows, she interactively shifts the terms of political engagement. Her work functionally transforms the meanings of an array of cultural and political phenomena such as popular revolutionary slogans, cultural beliefs, pronouncements by key Islamist figures, news clips of the revolutionary period, and documentary evidences of government-supported violence by incorporating them into critical feminist exilic recollections in visual and narrative forms. In their new frameworks, these materials take on new critical meanings.
Each segment opens to a window that then enlarges in line with a voice-over, as if to allow the viewer to peer into an unsequenced moment in the fictional narrator's life. Mina and Goli's segments, which more emphatically narrate the refugees' escape to Canada after the Iranian Revolution, all begin with a series of dancing hands, each time gesturing a little differently. Their segments clearly take issue with the human rights violations of the Islamic Republic, and here, women's rights are pointedly human rights. Each segment associated with Mina and Goli's narratives incorporates the gesturing hands as if to signal a critique of the ways in which many on the left, and Michel Foucault in particular, supported the Islamist regime and, by extension, its asphyxiation of women's rights. 6 Writing about the Iranian Revolution, Foucault lauded the populist zeal by which "the new" was brought to power, naming the Iranian Revolution, "the revolution of bare hands." 7 The true revolution of bare hands, it would seem, is the revolution brought about in the uprooted lives of Hashemi's characters, women who because of their sex and their political involvement in prerevolutionary struggles were tortured, violated, and ultimately forced into exile. Hashemi juxtaposes the populist slogans hailing Khomeini and his government with documentary reels of government-supported stonings for acts of adultery. Khomeini's handwriting wallpapers a shifting photomontage of a veiled comic character in Goli's window. Such juxtapositions are at the very nerve center of Of Shifting Shadows. And though the fictional author suggests that meaning is an impossibility, it would seem that the viewer is called to task to critically construct sense out of these very paradoxes that made up a revolution and its afterlives....
[The full text of the article is available at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_history_review/v086/86.1mottahedeh.html> and <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_history_review/v086/86.1mottahedeh.pdf> if you have individual or institutional access to the Project Muse.] *****