01 photograph, Middle East Artists, THE ART OF WAR, Shirin Neshat's Untitled, with Footnotes #98

Shirin Neshat (b. 1957)

Untitled, c. 1996

Ink on gelatin silver print

38¼ x 55 1/8in. (94 x 140cm.)

Private collection

Sold for GBP 37,250 in Oct 2008

The present photograph belongs to an early series titled 'Women of Allah', in which Neshat depicts Islamic women wearing chadors and tattooed inscriptions of decorative patterns, devotional prayers, or poems in Farsi. She uses the Islamic veil to explore and deconstruct stereotypes of Muslim women as oppressed by religion but also empowered by their rejection of the Western imperialistic gaze. In this visually striking image executed in 1995, the woman conceals her face behind a rifle, which, with its masculine connotation, sharply contrasts with the erotic undertone of the decorative patterns. The weapon and the Islamic script also allude to Western perceptions of Islam as both impenetrable and threatening - an interpretation that is even more poignant in the current geopolitical context. More on this photograph

Shirin Neshat (born March 26, 1957) is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography She is the fourth of five children of wealthy parents, brought up in the religious town of Qazvin in north-western Iran. 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 my 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.[4] Through her grandparents, her mother's parents, Neshat learned traditional religious values. More on Shirin Neshat

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