Art Basel Miami Beach 2024, December 5

Premier artist talk: Shirin Neshat

false

Shirin Neshat, Artist and filmmaker, New York Kimberly Bradley, Conversations Curator, Art Basel
For more than four decades, Iranian-born, New York-based artist Shirin Neshat’s art has challenged societal norms, in particular those of her birth country, with evocative imagery that is as poetic as it is political, as melancholic as it is mystical. Her work as a photographer, video artist, filmmaker, and most recently, opera director consistently celebrates the power – and empowerment – of women. From her youth in Iran to next year’s restaging of Verdi’s Aida at the Paris Opera, this talk surveys the celebrated artist’s life and work. 
The Art Basel Miami Beach 2024 Conversations program is curated by Kimberly Bradley.
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat works and continues to experiment with the mediums of photography, video, film, and opera, which she imbues with highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives that question issues of power, religion, race, gender, and the relationships between the past and present, East and West, individual and collective through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian woman living in exile.
Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museo Correr, Venice; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Neshat has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice International Film Festival, Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017), and most recently Land of Dreams (2021), which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
Neshat directed her first opera, Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg Festival in 2017 and 2022, which will be restaged at the Paris Opera in 2025. Neshat has been awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1999); the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005); the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006); and in 2017, she received the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award in Tokyo. She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in London.

From Hong Kong to Basel, dive into our rich archive of talks and debates, featuring leading voices of the art world and beyond