The Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Art (CIRCA) is proud to present WOMAN LIFE FREEDOM, an urgent public commission by celebrated Iranian artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat, broadcasting 1-4 October 2022 across Europe’s largest screen, Piccadilly Lights, and Pendry West Hollywood, Los Angeles at 20:22 local time.

Since CIRCA first broadcast on Piccadilly Lights with Ai Weiwei on the 1st October 2020, a new conception of freedom and imagination has begun to take hold, one that reminds us of our collective potential to remake the world we inhabit. Together, emerging and established voices are recentering both art and social change, not as the fringe activities of elites or radicals, but as roles essential to human life. In an open letter published earlier this week, Shirin Neshat, Ali Abassi and Bahman Ghodabi invited people around the world to further echo the rallying cries of Iranians for freedom. Through this cross-atlantic response and countless others, hope prevails.

Our potential to create new worlds is not lost but sleeping. Influenced by the science fiction writer Octavia Butler, author Adrienne Maree Brown argues that ‘all organizing is science fiction’; that together, we imagine a better world, then fight to make it real. Through a combination of urgency and care, Shirin Neshat selected two pivotal works from her Women of Allah series (1993-1997) titled Moon Song and Unveiling. Coinciding with an eruption of international protests in solidarity with those risking their lives for basic human rights, WOMAN LIFE FREEDOM serves as a strong and symbolic accompaniment to the slogan being voiced across Iran.

Shirin Neshat, said:

As an artist devoted to making art that resonates to her people in Iran and internationally beyond just the art world, it feels like a perfect fit to work with CIRCA whose main premise is to make art accessible to a larger public, particularly in a time of crisis when people are looking for meaning and hope in the midst of chaos and political injustice.

Moon Song forms part of Shirin Neshat’s series Women of Allah, created between 1993 and 1997 after the artist’s first return to Iran since the Islamic Revolution (1979) “In this work and in some of the other images in the series, I tried to capture the identity conflict that exists amongst Iranians, who are caught between their rich ancient Persian history, and a non-secular Islamic identity, which was brought by force after the Islamic Republic of Iran hijacked the 1979 Revolution.”

For me, the meaning of the text and the bullets suggests the modern and contemporary reality of Iran, while the paisley and other floral motifs are symbolic of Iranians’ rich ancient Persian history. In my view this cultural contradiction has been the Iranians’ biggest grief and dilemma who are struggling between these two opposing identities. The majority of Iranians do not identify, nor feel comfortable abiding to such oppressive Islamic codes and laws.

The Farsi text inscribed on the left hand is an excerpt from the magic realist book The Drowned written by the Iranian female author Moniro Ravanipour. “I was inspired by the writer’s visual and imaginative narrative that makes an allegorical analogy between a storm taking place under the sea and the political climate on land, as Iranians struggled with their life circumstances in turbulent times.”

The Women of Allah series of photographs addresses the complexities of women’s identity in the midst of a changing cultural and political landscape in Iran after the 1979 revolution. Inspired by newspaper clippings circulating at the time of the Iranian Revolution and during the Iran-Iraq War, Neshat attempted to capture and question the contradictory nature of militant Muslim women, who stood at a peculiar intersection of love, devotion and faith yet violence, cruelty and death. Four symbolic elements recur in this work: the veil, the gun, the text and the gaze. The farsi inscribed texts, overlayed on the surface of
the images are excerpts of poems written by Iranian female poets and writers.

Shirin Neshat (b. 1957, Qazvin, Iran) is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat’s early photographic works include the Women of Allah series (1993–1997), which explored the question of gender in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy. Her subsequent video works departed from overtly political content or critique in favor of more poetic imagery and narratives. In her practice, she employs poetic imagery to engage with themes of gender and society, the individual and the collective, and the dialectical relationship between past and present, through the lens of her experiences of belonging and exile.

She has mounted numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally, including: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Recent solo exhibitions include: Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria; Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen; Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany; and Museo Correr,Venice,  Italy, which was an official corollary event to the 57th Biennale di Venezia in 2017. A major retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2013. Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006). In 2009, Neshat directed her first feature-length film, Women Without Men, which received the Silver Lion Award for “Best Director” at the 66th Venice International Film Festival. Dreamers marked her first solo show on the African continent, which exhibited at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in 2016. That same year, Neshat featured in the New Revolutions: Goodman Gallery at 50 exhibition in Johannesburg and in the Summers group exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape Town. In 2017, Neshat was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award for Painting. That same year, Neshat directed Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg. In 2017, Neshat was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award for Painting. That same year, Neshat directed Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg.  The Broad Museum in Los Angeles recently hosted a survey exhibition of the last 25 years of Neshat’s work, which travelled on to Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2021. This year Neshat was the feature artist and Master of Photography at Photo London festival which took place in Somerset House in September.

Neshat has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival,  Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017,) and most recently Land of Dreams (2021) which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

The artist lives and works in New York, USA.