Shirin Neshat
| Shirin Neshat | |
|---|---|
,_Shirin_Neshat.jpg)
Neshat at the Viennale 2009
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| Born |
March 26, 1957 Qazvin, Iran |
| Occupation | Artist, filmmaker, photographer |
| Spouse(s) | Kyong Park (divorced) |
| Partner(s) | Shoja Azari |
| Children | Cyrus Park |
Shirin Neshat (Persian: شیرین نشاط; born March 26, 1957) is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. Her artwork centers on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects. Neshat has been recognized countless times for her work, from winning the International Award of the XLVIII Venice Biennale in 1999, to winning the Silver Lion for best director at the 66th Venice Film Festival in 2009, to being named Artist of the Decade by Huffington Post critic G. Roger Denson.
Neshat is the fourth of five children of wealthy parents, brought up in the religious town of Qazvin in north-western Iran under a "very warm, supportive Muslim family environment", where she learned traditional religious values through her maternal grandparents. Neshat's father was a physician and her mother a homemaker. Neshat said that her father "fantasized about the west, romanticized the west, and slowly rejected all of his own values; both her parents did. What happened, I think, was that their identity slowly dissolved, they exchanged it for comfort. It served their class”. As a part of Neshat’s "Westernization" she was enrolled in a Catholic boarding school in Tehran. Through her father’s acceptance of Western ideologies came an acceptance of a form of western feminism. Neshat’s father encouraged each of his daughters to "be an individual, to take risks, to learn, to see the world", and he sent his daughters as well as his sons to college to receive their higher education.
Neshat graduated from UC Berkeley in 1983, where she soon moved to New York City, it was there she quickly realized that making art wasn’t going to be her profession at the time. . After meeting her future husband, who ran the storefront for Art and Architecture an alternative space in Manhattan, she had dedicated 10 years of her life to working with him at the storefront, which was where her true education began.
During this time, she did not make any serious attempts at creating art, and the few attempts were subsequently destroyed. In 1990, she returned to Iran. "It was probably one of the most shocking experiences that I have ever had. The difference between what I had remembered from the Iranian culture and what I was witnessing was enormous. The change was both frightening and exciting; I had never been in a country that was so ideologically based. Most noticeable, of course, was the change in people's physical appearance and public behavior."
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