Women in black - Islamic fundamentalism in the photographs of Shirin Neshat
From Asian Art Documentation
Women in black - Islamic fundamentalism in the photographs of Shirin Neshat Art Journal, Winter, 2001 by Igor Zabel
text source: FindArticles.com
The Sign for the Orient
The photographic self-portraits of Shirin Neshat in which she appears in the role of a "veiled" Muslim woman, often with a gun, and with parts of her body covered with written text invoke well-known media cliches of Oriental culture and their established, although not necessarily unambiguous, meaning. (1) In the Middle East, the image of a covered woman is one of the most ubiquitous signs for contemporary Islamic fundamentalist societies.
Since the publication of Edward W. Said's book Orientalism in 1978, the term "Orient" has acquired a specific meaning, not unimportant for Neshat's work. (2) Said demonstrates how nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western European scholars, writers, politicians, and others developed a particular complex of discourses about the "Orient," which for them largely signified the Middle East. This complex, which Said calls Orientalism, is based on the belief that there is a fundamental opposition between the Orient and the Occident, and that a cultural system exists through which the "Oriental" world is presented by the West. Orientalism is therefore not only a constructed image of the Other, but also a means by which the West exerts dominance over the East.
In 1971, Joco Znidarsic, a leading newspaper photographer in Slovenia, took a photograph entitled Iran. In it, two veiled women stare passively and fatalistically through the viewer. As I was writing the first version of this essay a few years ago, the Slovenian daily newspaper Delo published a short note about a parade in Tehran celebrating the seventeenth anniversary of the Iraq-Iran war. The photograph chosen to illustrate the article was an image of women dressed in the loose black robes of strict Muslim practice, marching in ordered rows, and holding Kalashnikov rifles. The few characteristic details in both photographs depict these women as cautious, distrustful, unpredictable, and even dangerous--transforming small social and cultural realities into general symbols. These "women in black" are not presented as individuals, but as nameless soldiers of the Revolution. The figure of the "woman in black" functions in the West as a general sign for the Muslim world and its allegedly incomprehensible, irrati onal, uncertain, and threatening nature. Advertisement
The "woman in black"--so heavily laden with stereotypes and fantasies--is the figure Shirin Neshat uses as the central motif in her photographs. She does not try to purify the image of its role as signifier for the otherness of the Muslim world. Such an attempt would necessarily fail, since the image itself is inseparable from this connotation. She does quite the opposite: she simulates it, making us aware of its constructed, artificial nature.
Neshat makes explicit the ambiguities of the stereotype--for the covered woman has different meanings, according to context. But in every context, she is also the generic Muslim woman, who represents our Western notions of the "Orient" and "Islam," or perhaps "Iran." It is challenging--especially for the Western observer, whose image of the Muslim world is generally based not on experience but on media cliches--that Neshat does not replace existing stereotypes with more "accurate" representations; instead, she uncovers the multiplicity of possible meanings embedded in them.
The stereotypical image of the covered Muslim woman corresponds to several subtypes. Arguably, the most often-represented one is the passive, repressed woman, whose conservative fatalism prevents her from attempting to change her lot. We also know of other Muslim women, who can be more active, such as the young intellectual, often educated in the West, who accepts Islam as a basis for a different modern identity. It is, however, implied in the Western media that, in her search for a non-Western modern identity, she is dangerous. Embracing conservative and fundamentalist forces, she may become a religious fanatic, the media construction of a Jihad, a terrorist and revolutionary obsessed with Holy War against non-Muslim cultures, and ready to sacrifice her own life and the lives of others. In the photograph of the parade in Tehran, the woman in black has renounced her individuality to become the image of a soldier of the Islamic revolution, one drop in a sea of fanaticized crowds ready to fight, kill and die a t the command of religious leaders. This black, shapeless creature is a peculiar mixture of the fatalistic, the fanatical, and the passive. These stereotypes of the Islamic world, as represented by the woman in black, provoke reactions in the West that range from compassion to fear to hatred. Neshat combines these signifying relations into complex and self-contradictory wholes. Repression, fatalism, and passivity, social marginalization, veiled erotic promise, inspiration, heroism, mercilessness, and danger converge in a single female figure dressed in a chador.
Neshat's aim is not to dispose of media cliches, but to recompose and reorganize them in ways that produce more flexible and complex readings. Without claiming to present the truth, her images correspond to the images and ideals that determine Iranian society itself. Her photographs not only deconstruct stereotypical Western representations of the Middle East, but simultaneously explore the complex position, role, and ideological context of women in Iranian society Her pictures function as a multipart mirror in that they address not only Western audiences, but the Muslim world as well. Neshat herself pointed to the fact that her works speak differently to a Western observer than to a Muslim one. (3) This is especially clear in Stories of Martyrdom (1994) and Seeking Martyrdom (1995), in which she refers to the idea of shahadat or martyrdom. She reorganizes the stereotypes of Islamic terrorism to convey a spiritual, emotional, and even poetical dimension of the "terrorist," so that the idea of martyrdom can be understood as the consequence of following and witnessing divine truth, and thus as a moral imperative. (4) Identity
Neshat's images are provocative because they seem to lack a distinct "moral" stance. They would probably not be so provocative if they could be taken as a clear statement for or against Islamic fundamentalism. One could reduce them to a critical presentation of how media functions, or how Western culture constructs the Orient as its own phantasmic Other in a world where ideas of "multiculturalism" have become official ideologies. Nevertheless, they maintain a certain ambiguity and distance that has to do with the artist's own physical presence in her work. She engages these stereotypes by playing the role of "fundamentalist" and even "terrorist." While such role-playing may indicate a hidden identification with the role, I do not mean to read the artist psychoanalytically, but rather to explore the effect of her works, which I am tempted to call "paranoid constructions." While we may be rationally aware that the works deal only with the problem of media stereotypes, we may have the feeling that the artist is deadly serious in turning her guns on us. We are caught in the tension between knowledge and belief, as it is described in psychoanalytical theory: we know that this is just an image, but we do not quite believe it. (5)
This uncanny game of playing a role while identifying with it reflects an understanding that identity itself is constructed. Neshat clearly demonstrates how the generic "Muslim woman" is a construct, but one that may determine the social position and also the self-understanding of women in various Muslim societies--becoming their identity. Advertisement
Signs of a Divided World
The double meaning of Neshat's work is at once the result of a divided world, partitioned by closed, often hostile, cultural boundaries, and an analysis of those divisive mechanisms. By including Farsi calligraphy written over the images, Neshat creates a pure, sensual, visual presence, and a material ornament that indicates meaning but hides it from most Western audiences who will, in most cases, be unable to read or understand it. It is the emptiness of meaning that makes room for stereotypes.
In a 1997 interview, Neshat observed that she is often asked if the inscriptions are taken from the Qur'an. (6) This seems a natural question, given the prevalence of stereotypes about Islamic fundamentalism, in which the Qur'an is the compulsory-- the only possible--text. That the answer is not available within the works to viewers who know no Farsi underscores Neshat's point.
When I first saw Neshat's photographs at the 1995 Transculture exhibition in Venice, I immediately thought that I recognized the represented person: I "knew" I was looking at an Islamic terrorist. But an essential part of this first reaction was a feeling of a gap, an inconsistency. Because of this gap, I was able to distance myself from my first impressions and recognize in them a mixture of old and more recent stereotypes and preconstructed ideas about the "Orient," the Middle East, and the Muslim world. The phantasmic mixture of spirituality, poetry, fanaticism, and violence did not, however, disappear after this insight. Rather, it changed its role. The divided world in which we live is not a fiction; representational stereotypes that function as divisive mechanisms cannot simply be dismissed. An important effect of Neshat's photographs is that they prompt us to rethink our own position in this divided world and our relationship to Others.
Igor Zabel is Senior Curator at the Moderna Galerija (Museum of Modern Art), Ljubljana, Slovenia. His recent projects include The Eye and Its Truth, Ljubljana, 2001 (curator): 2000+-the Arteast Collection, Ljubljana, 2000 (co-curator); and Manifesto 3. Ljubljana, 2000 (coordinator). He has recently published texts in Words of Wisdom. New York. 2001; L'outre moitie de J'Europe, Paris, 2000; Aspects/Positions, Vienna, 2000: and After the Wall, Stockholm, 1999. Neshat's photographs were exhibited in Ljubljana by the Moderna Galerija and the City of Women Festival in 1997.
(1.) Such pictures include: Rebellious Silence, 1994; Allegiance with Wakefulness, 1994; Seeking Martyrdom, versions I and 2, 1995; I Am Its Secret, 1993; Stories of Martyrdom, 1994; Faceless, 1994; Moon Song, 1995; Speechless, 1996.
(2.) Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); and see Neshat's statements in her interview with Octavio Zaya in "Armed and Dangerous: Shirin Neshat interviewed by Octavio Zaya." aRUDE 2 (Spring 1996), 54-55
