The Art Newspaper:

Shirin Neshat’s early life in the US was less American Dream and more brutal reality. The Iranian-born artist and film-maker was 17 in 1975 when she arrived in Los Angeles—and she hated it. The Hollywood glamour that had intoxicated her in the cinema of her small hometown of Qazvin, two hours outside of Tehran, was not what she encountered. “I was very, very homesick,” Neshat remembers. Later she moved north to study art at Berkeley, but she continued to feel lost—and, when it came to creating art, inept. After graduating and leaving California, Neshat stopped making art for ten years.

Forty years on, she is triumphantly returning to the city in which those dreams were dashed. Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again at the Broad museum (19 October-16 February 2020) spans her 30-year career, showing more than 230 photographs and eight video installations, many exploring her American-Iranian identity in the context of the ruptures between the West and the Middle East. They include the new multimedia work, Land of Dreams.

As well as the Broad exhibition, Neshat is organising A Bridge Between You and Everything: an Exhibition of Iranian Women Artists at the High Line Nine Galleries in New York (7-24 November), with the US non-profit Center for Human Rights in Iran. The Art Newspaper wrote about the show in July and since then, Neshat says, “Some of the artists have backed out in fear of not being able to return to Iran, or of having problems with the government, because the organisation we are working with is about human rights.” She adds: “The more this show is developing, the more it becomes clear to me why it is important to do it: it shows artists whose work is always caught between a political reality and their personal circumstances.” At the end of January 2020, meanwhile, she will show some of the work from Land of Dreams at Goodman Gallery’s new London space.

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