Humanities & Foreign Policy

This is a short lecture presented by IU professor, Jamsheed Choksy, who specializes in Iranian Studies, Indian subcontinental studies, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and Manichaeism. He also writes about Middle Eastern politics for the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and FP.  I had the pleasure of taking his course--Iranian Civilization: Poets, Prophets, and Kings during my first semester at IU.  His presentation to the National Humanities Alliance (Sep. 2011) highlights the importance of funding the humanities as academic scholarship can contribute to improving American foreign policy and national security.

Tribute to Shirin Neshat

Neshat left Iran to study art in Los Angeles at about the time that the Iranian Revolution occurred. In 1990, she returned to Iran. "It was probably one of the most shocking experiences that I have ever had. The difference between what I had remembered from the Iranian culture and what I was witnessing was enormous. The change was both frightening and exciting; I had never been in a country that was so ideologically based. Most noticeable, of course, was the change in people's physical appearance and public behavior." As a way of coping with the discrepancy between the culture that she was experiencing and that of the pre-revolution Iran in which she was raised, she began her first mature body of work, the Women of Allah series.

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 showing two or more coordinated films concurrently, creating stark visual contrasts through motifs such as light and dark, black and white, male and female.

The work of Shirin Neshat addresses the social, political and psychological dimensions of women's experience in contemporary Islamic societies. Although Neshat actively resists stereotypical representations of Islam, her artistic objectives are not explicitly polemical. Rather, her work recognizes the complex intellectual and religious forces shaping the identity of Muslim women throughout the world. Using Persian poetry and calligraphy she examined concepts such as martyrdom, the space of exile, the issues of identity and femininity.

As a photographer and video-artist, Shirin Neshat was recognized for her portraits of women entirely overlaid by Persian calligraphy (notably through the Women of Allah series). She also directed several videos, among them Anchorage (1996) and, projected on two opposing walls: Shadow under the Web (1997), Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Soliloquy (1999). She currently lives in New York City.

Slideshow 

Video from December 2010, Art in Exile