Juliet Art Magazine : Body of evidence by Shirin Neshat on show at PAC Milan: beyond the curtain of dualism, bodies without contradiction

To move a heavy black curtain to witness the story of separation. This is the gesture by which one becomes a spectator of Body of evidence, the exhibition on Shirin Neshat (Iranian, now settled in New York) at the PAC in Milan, which invites us to spy from behind a material and metaphorical curtain that acts as a boundary between the real of the Milanese streets and the surrealistic setting of the works on display, narrating the Iranian culture of division.

Shirin Neshat, “Rebellious Silence”, from the series “Women of Allah”, 1993-1997, silver gelatin print and ink, courtesy of the artist.

The projection that inhabits the first room (Fervor), in fact, immediately presents the dualism that silently directs the eyes of the visitor, far and blind to the culture with which he or she is about to relate. The video follows chance encounters between a man and a woman, including one at a public talk about erotic passion. The vision moves on two distinct channels: one follows the female audience and one the male audience, obscured from each other without any possibility of communication or contact. Adding to the sense of confusion, then, is the rhetor’s speech, which, bearing no subtitles, is incomprehensible to us. Yet, we sense that we would remain entangled in total incomprehension even if we knew the language of the oration, so distant are we from the sociopolitical paradigm that forms its backdrop. The incomprehension of such a social and religious “bottleneck,” which forces the boundary of desire and the relational split between the two sexes, is an important thread in Neshat’s research, which attempts to transcribe on film her own doubtful questioning of the land of her birth.

Shirin Neshat, “Fervor”, 2000, silver print, copyright Shirin Neshat, courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery.

Her images are evocative of a question, that of the culture of separation and the forbidden, which is translated into a work of visualization. Indeed, the artist attempts to make visible the inner motions, as well as the identities, of those who have no political voice, those whose face in the polis is relegated behind an ideological curtain. From this intent comes the Women of Allah series, portraits of veiled women executed after Shirin’s first trip home. Given their strong and imposing gestures (one, for example, holds a gun pointed at the viewer), the figures evoke and at times compel reflection on the cultural contradictions accentuated after the Khomeinist Revolution, which are recapitulated in the conception of the female body as an embodiment of love, devotion and sacrifice, but also hatred, cruelty and violence. The title of the exhibition, Body of evidence, indicates nothing other than that woman’s body bearing on itself the signs of a certain social structure, built up through the dualism between the visible and the non-visible, strength and resistance, intelligence and villainy. The hidden signs of this side of history become visible in the ink, reciting texts in Farsi by Iranian women writers, with which the artist covers the only naked parts of the Women.

Shirin Neshat, “Body of evidence”, installation view, ph. Nico Covre, courtesy PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milano.

These bodies of crime that Neshat unveils and at the same time obscures with her art are located on the PAC’s balcony, overlooking the other shore where the artist’s roots lie, the Land of dreams of the United States, where the young Iranian chooses the identity of the exile. Here the high walls of the room envelop the visitor, inserting him or her in a reflection of gazes among the photographs of dozens of Americans who have bared, as a result of the artist’s questioning, their own american dream, transcribed in the background from which the portraits emerge and presented in a short film that crowns the investigation of the dream. The oneiric, from being the content of the work, becomes its style in the adjoining rooms, in which the continuity between Iranian and U.S. inhabitants, assimilated neither by the political nor the religious system, but by the contradictions that both subjugate and animate the human condition, is increasingly perceived.

Shirin Neshat, “Land of Dreams”, 2019, video still. Two-channel video installation, copyright Shirin Neshat, courtesy the artist, Gladstone Gallery and Goodman Gallery.

Oppression and freedom, beauty and vulnerability, obfuscation and awareness: an all-pervasive dualism of which the separation of man and woman in the Iranian regime is the first implementation. Triggering a kind of human short-circuit, the co-presence of these opposing values reveals a perturbing atmosphere, which the artist stages in a personal but never autobiographical perspective, as in the works Turbulent, Rapture and Roja. If the dualistic conception is often read as a contradiction, the Iranian-U.S. artist offers a visually powerful key to rereading dualism as inherent in the human form and, indeed, as what gives it form-exactly as the contrast between the black and white of her shots creates the photographic film.

Info:

Shirin Neshat. Body of evidence
28.03.2025 – 08.06.2025
PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea
via Palestro, 14, Milano
www.pacmilano.it

Written by Ginevra Ventura for https://www.juliet-artmagazine.com/