Shirin Neshat

Art Brokerage: Shirin Neshat Iranian Artist: b. 1957. Shirin Neshat was born March 26, 1957 in Qazvin, Iran. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. Neshat left Iran to study art in Los Angeles. It was about this time that the Iranian Revolution occurred. As an effect of the political restructuring after the revolution, her father who had been financially secure and about to retire was left without benefits and a meager salary. Once the revolution was over and the society was restructured as a traditional Islamic nation, her family was no longer able to enjoy the comfortable life to which they had grown accustomed. About a year after the revolution, she moved to the San Francisco Bay area and began studying at Dominican College. Eventually, she enrolled in UC Berkeley and completed her BA, MA and MFA. After graduate school, she moved to New York and began to work for a non-profit organization called Storefront Art and Architecture. This multidisciplinary organization exposed her to many different ideologies and would become a place where she received much needed experience with and exposure to concepts that would later become integral to her artwork. Her work refers to the social, cultural and religious codes of Muslim societies and the complexity of certain oppositions, such as man and woman. Neshat often emphasizes this theme with the technique of showing two or more coordinated films concurrently, creating stark visual contrasts through such motifs as light and dark, black and white, male and female. Neshat has also made more traditional narrative short films, such as her recent work, Zarin. Listings wanted.