Shirin Neshat on Female Imprisonment, Generational PTSD and Seduction for Survival
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World renowned Iranian film-maker and artist Shirin Neshat is exhibiting her latest work at this year's BFI London Film Festival: Premiering for the first time is Neshat’s two part exhibition, The Fury which takes us through the trauma and emotional turmoil of a female prisoner.
Born in 1957 in Qazvin, Iran, Shirin moved to the US aged 17. The return to her home country marked her deeply and resulted in politically charged artworks, for which she has been heavily criticised. Her themes revolve around her personal experiences of belonging and exile, the individual and the collective and the exploration of the female body.
The Fury purveys a sense of helplessness intertwined with the protagonist’s anger as she finds it impossible to deal with her trauma; Her suffering becomes visible and resonates with bystanders. Shirin explores the female body and the contradictory ways in which it can be weaponized, sometimes even becoming a weapon for the oppressed themselves to use. Her highly stylised artwork consists of a two screen video piece and a 360 VR film. We chat to Shirin about the mental struggles of immigrants, PTSD and the power of letting your hair down.
Seeing the VR film, the first thing that came to my mind was The Night Porter (1974). Why did you decide to choose this aesthetic?
Shirin Nesrat: I’m very interested in relationships of power, particularly within prison systems of people who are victims of their oppressive regime. One of the first things they do in prison in Iran, and I’m sure it’s the case in many other countries too, is that they sexually abuse the men and women to break them. So I had this idea of doing a dance, being seductive, doing something for survival.
There’s this fine balance between the need for freedom and transcending the situation by using the property of your body. I’m making this reference to The Night Porter in relation to the women of Iran and how their bodies are both an object of desire and violence. So the victimisation of some is a way for us to identify with their pain and therefore respond.
In the end it seems as though the voyeur becomes the victim. Are we culpable as spectators? it reminded me of the quote “evil prospers when good men do nothing”…
This piece isn't only about Iran. I’ve lived in the US longer than I lived in my own country. My intention was to talk about how most women have been sexually molested to some degree, but we don't like to speak about it because it’s in our nature to some degree to take the blame. This is the best way to break people, it’s really one of the most difficult things to overcome. In The Fury, even though this woman is free and in the US, she’s still heavily traumatised and very much disconnected from her life here. That is to say that even in a state of freedom, that is all she can focus on.
The girl is dancing with untamed, long hair, it feels as if there is something ancestral about this image…
She has this power of seduction, eroticism, temptation and she knows that she can give pleasure to her interrogator. There’s this double reality about her body that is a tool of violence but she is absolutely desirable and she is conscious of that. The same way the women in Iran have become conscious of the fact that even though their bodies have become a space for oppression and abuse, they know how powerful it is to just wear their hair down. So I was playing with the idea that she is at once a victim but also a dominant force. That’s why there are two points of view within the installation where the narrative gets broken.
We don’t see how she obtains her injuries, is that to preserve her dignity?
Yes exactly, nobody touches her. It’s a highly stylised and fictionalised way of showing things but I wanted to make it more poetic and focus more on the subliminal.
Other films such as Salo (1977) and The Tin Drum (1979) use disgust as a way to convey the horrors of fascism, but you created something that is more subtle. Was this choice influenced by your upbringing?
Most of my work is very politically charged but I never point fingers. The subtlety allows us to go into the psychological mind of the character as opposed to the information around it. I'm not so interested in questioning those men in power but questioning the mental and spiritual state of a woman who is trying to survive - I'm more of a poet than a political activist. But I think what’s in my subconscious is years and years of censorship.
Once the girl is freed, the healing can begin and it is a painful process. Is this a nod to displacement or second generation PTSD?
I'm very interested in mental illnesses that are not created in a biological way, but because of something that has happened to you. Much of my work has dealt with this notion of madness that is created because of social or political pressure.
Being an immigrant, many of us also suffer from this feeling of displacement. Our ear is with our music, our food, our family… but we are here and we don’t really connect. We find it quite melancholic and pay a high price to be in this place. In The Fury, the pain and the torture is so deep, she permanently lost the ability to be normal.
You moved to America in the 70s but came back to Iran in the 90s. What effect did this have on you and your artwork?
I became an artist after I went back. I was finally reunited with my family and the only goal was to just visit them. I had zero interest in being an artist.
But I was so infatuated by what I saw in both a horrifying and exhilarating way because the country had turned upside down. I started to meet up with my friends and once I got back I felt that making art became a reason to keep this connection alive. My artwork was born out of these short trips to Iran and my interest in reconnecting to Iranian culture.
The film gives us no solution, it is representative of a current struggle. Do you feel optimistic?
SN: The way in which these men and women came together and this dance of protest and the way in which her pain became contagious… It’s exactly what happened in Iran. What is touching and positive is the humanity of all of us, when we see someone broken or in pain, regardless of where they come from, we try to help them, because the human spirit is so powerful. All over the world Iranian people came out to support this movement. People have so much more power than they are aware of.
Words: Arijana Zeric
The Fury, comprising a two-screen video installation and a series of photographs, makes its UK debut at Goodman Gallery in London (7 October - 8 November).
The virtual reality version of the film shows at LFF Expanded (6 - 22 October) at the BFI London Film Festival.