Powerful, political, and cinematic is "The Fury", the latest body of work by Shirin Neshat, displayed at the Goodman Gallery in London in the fall following its first showing in New York. Since the 1990s, the visual artist has captivated viewers through work that investigates gender and society, time and memory, the individual and the collective, and the complexities and contradictions of Islam, told through a personal and diasporic lens. Shot in June 2022 near Neshat’s Brooklyn studio, the conscious staging, the casting of local actors, and the music speak of its international charge, a cry against violence against women, on the absurdity of war, intolerance, and tyranny in its broader universal context.

“I never wanted to make political art,” said the artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat to the crowd at Performa’s Biennial. “My work is politically charged because of the life that I have lived and because many of my collaborators, most of us, are living in exile.” Since leaving Iran at seventeen, Neshat has been living in the U.S., making work that captures the experiences of women and children living under fundamentalist regimes. Her photographs, videos and sculptures meld abstraction and poeticism; the hallmark of her work is the Farsi script that often runs across her subject’s faces, where a veil might lay, which serves to “break the silence” imposed upon women.

There just aren’t that many Iranian women in the art world,” says Shirin Neshat, the 66-year-old artist whose work in photography and film over the past 30 years has attracted acclaim and controversy in equal measure. Talking with her friends, art adviser Nazy Nazhand and artist Sheree Hovsepian, she adds: “I think that the connection between the three of us is that we feel kind of rare in this community. We each play a role.” [...] Neshat challenges Iran’s oppression of women — her seminal Women of Allah series, created between 1993 and 1997, brought the issue to a global audience. Many of her black-and-white photographs, including close-ups of eyes or hands, are superimposed with handwritten text in Farsi, including words from the late Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, to signify strength in the face of oppression. Social media has the power to mobilise . . . It’s our duty to make some noise.