‘Shirin Neshat: Born of Fire,” the internationally renowned Iranian-born artist’s first solo museum show in the New York area in 20 years and the first ever on the East End, will open Sunday at the Parrish Art Museum.
Ms. Neshat will be joined by Corinne Erni, the museum’s chief curator of art and education, who organized the exhibition, for a conversation on Saturday evening at 7. Advance registration is required for the program, which is likely to sell out early.
“I am beyond thrilled to present this survey of Shirin Neshat’s work — it is the culmination not only of her three-decades-long artistic career but our friendship that has lasted just as long,” said Ms. Erni. “Neshat’s starkly beautiful, hypnotizing, and rhythmically choreographed visual stories are profoundly cathartic; they transport us to an almost religious experience that reassures us of our humanity. Art can do that, and we need it in these turbulent times.”
Ms. Neshat has spent her career examining what it means to exist between two cultures. “Born of Fire” consists of specific bodies of work from four different time periods. The first, the photographic piece “Women of Allah” (1993-1997), was created after Ms. Neshat returned to Iran in 1990, her first time there since 1974, when she left to study art in Los Angeles.
While she was growing up, most Iranian women were not covered up, but when she returned, they were. She posed for the photographs dressed in the chador and, in some, holding a gun. The images are overlaid in Farsi calligraphy, all of which the artist did by hand.
“Four symbolic elements recur in this work: the veil, the gun, the text, and the gaze,” according to the artist. “Despite the Western representation of the veil as a symbol of Muslim women’s oppression, the subjects of these images look strong and imposing. . . . The texts are amalgams of poems and prose works mostly by contemporary women writers in Iran.”
The exhibition also includes “The Book of Kings” (2012), a portrait series inspired by “Shahnameh,” an 11th-century Persian verse poem that celebrates the Persian empire and the martyrdom of its people.
The staged photographs represent three groups: the masses, individual framed portraits of ordinary people; the patriots, figures with hands over their hearts, a universal patriotic gesture, and the villains, life-size portraits of political or religious figures whose torsos feature battle-scene imagery found in illustrations from “Shahnameh.”
For “Land of Dreams” (2019), Ms. Neshat photographed Americans in the Southwest, asked them about their dreams, and wrote those dreams in Farsi over their images.
“With ‘Land of Dreams,’ for the first time, I turn my lens toward the West,” she said in a statement, “and offer my point of view as an Iranian immigrant about America, a nation that once welcomed displaced immigrants, and how its core identity is now being compromised.”
The final work in the show, “The Fury” (2022-2023), addresses the sexual abuse of female political prisoners in Iran. A two-channel video installation and a series of nearly life-size black-and-white photographs focus on the female body as a site of both violence and strength. Inscribed with poetry by the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, the photographs convey both dignity and pain.
The show will devote a small gallery to objects from Ms. Neshat’s own collection, which includes work by Iranian and Middle Eastern artists as well as pieces by friends, including Robert Longo and Marina Abramovic.
The exhibition, which was organized by Ms. Erni with Scout Hutchinson, associate curator of exhibitions, will continue through Sept. 1.
Tickets for Saturday’s talk are $20, $18 for senior citizens, $10 for members’ guests and resident-benefits pass holders, and free for members, students, and children.
