Shirin Neshat

When the novella Women without Men was published in Tehran in 1989, it was promptly banned and its author, Shahrnush Parsipur, imprisoned. Fifteen years later, Shirin Neshat has begun to make a film based on ParsipurÌs work, which will become her first feature-length work. The first installments, documented here, introduce the lives of five women who find themselves in a deceptively paradisiacal garden after a difficult journey. NeshatÌs subversively dual filmic language, orientated towards both Iranian and western modes of cinematography, brings viewers and readers the open-endedness of her perspective on authenticity in both ethnicity and art, and brings to the fore her complex identity and the complex identity of her artistic practice–historically Western art for a largely Western audience centered on Iranian topics. This new book offers a provocative allegory of life in Iran today, and this sneak peek at NeshatÌs earliest work on it offers an invaluable glimpse of her working methods.