Shirin Neshat is no stranger to controversy. Since Women of Allah (1994–97), her very first photographic series, the Iranian-American artist has tackled burning issues head-on, always striking a balance between polarities such as East and West, masculine and feminine, the personal and the political.

At Art Basel Miami Beach 2024, Neshat was honored as the Artist Premiere in the Conversations program, curated by Kimberly Bradley. She spoke with Bradley about defiance, reinvention, and blurring the line between art and politics.

This interview is part of a new series showcasing highlights from Art Basel’s Conversations program.

Kimberly Bradley: Shirin, your biography is as rich as your body of work, which began with photography, then expanded to include video installations, feature films, and now even directing an opera and minting an NFT. Then and now, your works declare the female presence in a male-dominated culture and explore the power of the female gaze. Could you talk about how you got started?

Shirin Neshat: My artistic practice has been unconventional from the beginning. It was really an accident – my education has played almost no role in the evolution of my work. I am an artist who, to this day, is untrained in any of the mediums I work in – photography, video, film, and opera. My work comes from a deeply personal and emotional place. It is not autobiographical, but it serves as a way to bridge what goes on inside me – my inner world – and the world that I live in. Every project, image, and story is about framing a series of questions that are deeply important to me as a human being, reflecting how they impact my life but also the world at large. I aim to make work that not only speaks to me but raises issues that transcend my small existence. Lastly, I feel my work has consistently been about finding a balance between fiction and truth, poetics and reality, and beauty and horror in the world.

Looking back at some seminal pieces in your career, I’d like to start with Women of Allah, from the 1990s. This series of photographs combines images of women with Farsi script. How did this body of work emerge?

I have to share my personal story. I came to the United States just before the Iranian revolution in 1979. My education in art coincided with the revolution and the breakdown of the relationship between the US and Iran. It was also the time of the war between Iran and Iraq. These wars cut me off from Iran. At Berkeley, either I was incredibly untalented, or I was paralyzed by what was going on around me. For the next 12 years, I didn’t see my family and wasn’t able to go to Iran.

Fast forward: I came to New York and started over. New York allowed me to finally find roots and a community where I felt comfortable. In 1990, I returned to Iran for the first time in 12 years. That visit was transformative. Not only had I not seen my family, but the country had undergone enormous changes. I wasn’t making art at that time; I hadn’t created anything in over 11 years. My return to making art was about making sense of what had happened in Iran during my absence. It wasn’t a career move. It was driven by obsession and curiosity – by a need to understand the foundation of the revolution and the fanaticism that had taken over the country. I focused on the subject of martyrdom, which was highly institutionalized during the revolution. The idea of martyrdom, of men and women who stood at the intersection of a love of God, faith, religion, and violence, became central to my exploration. Women of Allah became a huge body of work. When I returned to New York, I started to develop a visual vocabulary, beginning with photography. Things evolved from there.

What about the script we see on the images?

There were four elements that appear in every Women of Allah image: a female body, a veil, a gun, and text. The female body, especially in this context, has always been extremely controversial and problematic in Islamic cultures. The veil is a symbol of repression but also of freedom and independence for many religious women. The gun symbolizes violence. And finally text suggests women’s voices – their intellectual and emotional expressions and strength. The poems were mostly written by Iranian women poets, like Tahereh Saffarzadeh, who had strong convictions about the Islamic revolution. And Forough Farrokhzad, an iconic and significant modern Iranian poet whose poems are timelessly powerful in how they tackle traditional, cultural, and religious taboos in relation to the female body, sexuality, and repression.

What were the reactions to your work?

There were various reactions from the art world, the Iranian government, and Iranian people. To this day, this remains some of my most iconic and most controversial work. I wasn’t able to return to Iran after creating this series because the Iranian government believed the images were critical of their regime and ideology. At the same time, many Iranian people and artists thought I was embracing the regime, supporting fanaticism, or even sensationalizing the violence of the revolution. Western art critics were completely puzzled; they thought I was making somewhat erotic images of veiled women with guns. The truth is that I was an artist living outside Iran, without a clear point of view. I was framing a series of questions: What is it like for a woman who gives life to also commit violence? Each image is paradoxical. This lack of a clear stance and my conceptual approach were difficult for the Iranian government, critics, and other people to grasp.

Did you expect this series to be so widely discussed?

No. To this day, most Iranians only know me through this body of work. Over time I’ve developed a clearer point of view. Looking back, there was something romantic and nostalgic about Women of Allah. It’s clearly the work of an artist who lived in the West, returned to Iran, and picked a highly problematic theme. I know I played with fire. This remains a body of work that some people find to be very critical, but it’s also the work most people know me for.

Let’s move on to the films: Turbulent (1998), which won the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999, and Rapture (1999). You mentioned in our conversations that Turbulent was a reaction to Women of Allah. In what way?

Women of Allah cost me a lot – another long separation from my country, living in exile, and the judgments that came with this politically charged work. Intuitively, I felt the desire to rebel against my signature work, which had become successful – people were buying Women of Allah in editions. But I thought, ‘I just can’t do this anymore.’ With video came the idea of getting out of the studio, incorporating landscapes, choreography, music, and directing. I became a storyteller, making work that was more evocative.

Turbulent focused on the subject of women in relation to music, and how in Iran, women aren’t allowed to perform publicly. Here the male singer sang beautiful traditional music to a full theater, while the female singer performed to an empty auditorium, breaking all the rules of traditional music with her guttural, wordless singing. Ultimately, she is victorious.

With Rapture it was about division between men and women. The men were confined to a fortress – a very masculine, militant space – while the women were in nature. By the end, the women find their way to the sea, get in a boat, and leave. Whether it’s seen as suicide or freedom, the women’s courage is symbolic.

You made many dual-channel works in this period. They’re all compelling to view, but what also struck me was how you experiment with sound. Could you tell us about the soundtracks?

In Women of Allah, I always thought that the poetry written on the photographs conveyed the emotional quality – that they were the voice of the woman. But with video the music became that emotional resonance. Especially now that I’m working in opera, I see music as an incredibly powerful, emotional, and universal language that needs no translation. I can put in front of you a narrative that somehow seems specific to a culture; but I can put in your ear music that brings you out of those specificities and reaches you in a very different dimension. I have been lucky enough to have worked with Sussan Deyhim, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Philip Glass, and now I continue to work in opera.

Speaking of specificity, the locations in these films look like they could be in Iran, but are not.

I’ve traveled all over the world to recreate Iran – Morocco, Mexico, Turkey, Egypt. I’ve become a nomadic artist. My work isn’t fully Iranian or fully Western; it exists in a hybrid space.

Women Without Men (2009) was your first feature-length work. How did you move into making feature films?

By 2000, I felt exhausted by the art world. I wanted to reach a broader audience, especially in my own community, and experiment with cinema. Women Without Men is based on a novel of the same title by Shahrnush Parsipur, who was imprisoned for writing this book. It tells the story of four women fleeing their difficult lives in Tehran in 1953 and finding refuge in an orchard – a magical, symbolic space, a world with its own logic. The film creates a parallel between their personal struggles and Iran’s fight for democracy during the CIA-backed coup of that year. It took six years to create, and we shot it in Morocco. When it premiered at the 66th Venice Film Festival, I won the Silver Lion for best director, which was shocking. It was pirated in Iran so many people saw it. One of the greatest honors in my career has been to make Women Without Men: It’s not flawless, but I am very proud of it.

A much more recent video, The Fury (2022) seems different: It’s set in the West.

The Fury was shot in my neighborhood in Bushwick, Brooklyn. It is a highly stylized film about a woman of Iranian descent, who was freed and is in the US, but is unable to recover from the trauma of sexual exploitation. The border between sanity and insanity is blurred. In the film, the woman has flashbacks of the darkest moments of facing her interrogator. Once she’s out in the street, the local people come to her in solidarity, like with the murder of Mahsa Amini, which launched the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022. Oddly that happened a month after I shot this. The Iranian people saw a martyr, which unleashed rage and led to protest. It’s uncanny: This video was pure fiction, but it literally came to life a month later.

You’ve said you’re not a political artist, although in a way, you always are. Do you think artists must take responsibility in difficult times?

I so wish I could make work that isn’t political. It really comes down to where you’re born. Do you think it’s possible for an artist from somewhere like Palestine or Israel or Iran or any politically volatile culture to distance themselves morally, emotionally, psychologically from political reality? Even if you paint a flower, that is a political statement, isn’t it? So the reality for artists like myself, who have unresolved relationships with their countries, is the inability to be muted to what is going on. This always impacts your work, even though in my case it’s never direct.

I always distinguish between activism and making art: In activism you can say everything, but in art you don’t decide for your audience what is good and bad, who’s right or wrong. I’m not interested in making art that tells people how to think. I would like them to think for themselves. Art should never be propaganda –therefore I separate the two. But we’re living in extremely difficult times and artists like me are thinking about the future, how we speak to our audience, and the work that we’ll be making in the future and how it could channel the suffering that we are seeing in the world today.

How do you stay grounded?

The past two years have been heartbreaking – the genocide in Palestine, Israeli hostages, the war in Lebanon, famine in Sudan, and more. I worry about the future of Iran, but I am even more worried about the future the country I live in: the United States. But I’m an optimist. I always think there is a bright light at the end of the tunnel. I believe in the good that lives in every one of us.