PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea presents the major solo exhibition of Iranian artist Shirin Neshat (1957, Qazvin), winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Art Biennale in 1999, the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2009 and the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo in 2017. The exhibition spans the artist’s more than 30-year career, with almost 200 photographs and ten video installations, collected by the world’s most important museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, the Guggenheim, New York and Tate Modern.
A multidisciplinary artist, Neshat works with photography, video, film and theatre, creating highly lyrical narratives and politically loaded visions that question the themes of power, religion, race and the relationship between past and present, east and west, individual and collective.
Neshat interprets the history and present of her birth country, Iran, and indeed the whole world from the female perspective: from her debut in the 1990s with the Women of Allah series, comprising photographs of women whose bodies are inscribed with poetic calligraphy, to The Fury, a video installation that anticipates the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Neshat’s work, however, goes beyond the theme of gender and uses male/female dualism as a starting point for exploring the tension between belonging and exile, sanity and insanity, dream and reality.
Curated by Diego Sileo and Beatrice Benedetti
The exhibition is promoted by the Municipality of Milan - Culture Directorate and produced by PAC and Silvana Editoriale. The project has been established thanks to Tod’s, with the support of Vulcano; technical partner Coop Lombardia; thanks to Reti S.p.A.
Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence, 1994
gelatin silver print and ink
© Shirin Neshat
Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery
