Shirin Neshat: Rapture December 29, 2010

Projected on opposing walls, Shirin Neshat's seminal video 'Rapture' (1999) simultaneously presents the male and female experience in Iran, casting them as separate realities. As men wearing casual Western clothing traverse the cobbled stones of an ancient Iranian city, women in full-length black chadors cross a barren desert landscape. Other scenes show homosocial interactions that mirror and deflect one another: men pray; women chat or wash clothes. Neshat, who was born and raised in Iran but has lived as an expatriate in New York for decades, references Persian, Asian, and Western art traditions in her films. With probing insight, sensitivity, and longing, Rapture presents, for Western eyes, the complexities of life and gender politics in Iran.