Shirin Neshat doesn’t shy away from complexity. Her internationally lauded photography and video installation work takes as its primary subject matter the epistemology that informs how we view Muslim women and the real world forces which shape there lived experiences. She challenges stereotypes and received knowledge in all of her works, a quality that has not gone unnoticed by the international art world. A pair of major installations in the late 1990’s, Turbulent (1998) and Rapture (1999), both of which received prizes at the Biennial of Venice, long ago cemented her place as one of the world’s most compelling visuals artists. That claim is only strengthened by her feature directorial debut Women Without Men.
Based very loosely on a novel by Shahrnoush Parsipour, the film tracks the lives of four disparate but loosely connected Iranian women who are collectively indicative of Tehran’s multilayered class system. Set during the fateful, tragic summer of 1953, the American backed coup d’etat which ousted democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh unfolds in the streets and in the narrative’s background. We are treated to no simple history lesson however; this is a sumptuous and melancholy glimpse at the inner lives four women in peril, each of whom resists the encroaching political and religious tyranny in their own desperate ways. As misogyny manifests itself in the clothing of religious devotion a… >>>
