Shirin Neshat was born in Qazvin, Iran in 1957 and left when she was just 17 to study art in America. She never went back until 1990, and when she did the country she returned to was completly different from the one she remembered. That shock changed everything. She started making art about what she saw, the contradictions, the silence, the women she barely recognised anymore. She’s been living in New York ever since, but Iran never left her.
Her big breakthrough was the “Women of Allah” series, photographs she made between 1993 and 1997. They show veiled women holding guns, with Persian poetry written all over their faces and hands in ink. She used her own body for some of them, becoming the woman in the picture. The images are stark, black and white, and they hit you like a punch. They ask who gets to speak, who gets to be seen, and what happens when your body becomes a battlefield.
Q: Why did Neshat start making films after photography?
A: She said photography wasn’t enought anymore. She wanted to tell bigger stories, with sound and movement and time. Her video installation “Turbulent” won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999. It shows a man singing to a full audience and a woman singing to an empty hall. No music, just voices. It’s about who gets heard and who gets ignored.
She once said, “My art has been my savior”. That line tells you everything about her work. It’s not decorative. It’s survival. She’s made films about exile, about women without men, about the Iranian revolution and the people who lived through it. Her characters are often caught between worlds, never fully belonging anywhere. That’s her too, in a way.
An interesting fact: her work has never been shown in Iran. The government considers it too political, too dangerous. But her images still find their way in, through smuggled DVDs and bootleg copies. She made a film called “Women Without Men” based on a banned Iranian novel, and it won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. It’s a story about five women trying to escape, and it feels like it could be her own.
Q: What is Neshat working on now?
A: In 2026, she premiered a new film trilogy called “Do U Dare!” at the Venice Biennale. It was inspired by Nasim Aghdam, an Iranian woman who shot up YouTube’s headquarters in 2018. Neshat saw something of herself in her, the isolation, the exile, the need to be seen. She’s still asking the same questions, just in different ways. She’s been at it for thirty years and she’s not done yet.
