Past exhibitions

Shirin Neshat is known for her video installations and photographs which explore immigrant experiences and dramatically confront the stereotypes of Muslim women.

Born in Iran in 1957, Neshat has lived in the United States since the early 1970s. She first received international recognition during the mid 1990s for her Women of Allah series, depicting women wearing the veil and holding guns with Iranian women’s poetry inscribed in Farsi across their faces and hands. Such images examine how human beings are trapped in social, cultural and political conditioning.

Neshat describes her work as a visual discourse on the subject of feminism and contemporary Islam, drawing on her personal experiences.

This two-screen installation, Tooba, is inspired by Shahrnoush Parsipour’s contemporary novel Women without men and uses mythology drawn from the Koran. Conceived in the form of a poetic allegory, the work reveals that even in paradise there is conflict. It is accompanied by a series of the artist’s photographs.