Challenging identity politics both in her homeland of Iran and the along global patriarchal front at large, groundbreaking international visual artist Shirin Neshat’s powerful photography and video work voices her struggle for personal freedom in the Muslim world. Living in exile throughout most of her career and working in New York, Neshat will exhibit a major survey covering 25 years of her compelling work at The Broad this October, giving a greater context to the political narratives she tells using her own body to dispute the social ideologies attacking her independence. 

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Shirin Neshat, Untitled (Women of Allah), 1996. © Shirin Neshat/Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

Utilizing aesthetic elements like her bold command of performance art in her videos and her beautiful hand-painted text borrowed from Iranian poets such as Forugh Farrokhzad, this I Will Greet the Sun Again exposes the disconnect society has imposed on her female individuality and brings additional insight to psychological issues of oppression, displacement and eroticism provoked by restrictive cultures. The largest exhibition of her work to date, the show features approximately 150 photographs and videos, including eight immersive video installations. 

Loosely chronological, the collection expresses the evolution in her ideas from 1993 to the present, and inspires timely points of view on immigration, gender and nationalism. Starting with all three subsets of her seminal photographic series Women of Allah (1995), Neshat will parallel her experience in Iran and the Western world throughout the exhibition, while presenting her personal journey as an artist. 

The Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., downtown; Sat., Oct. 19-Sun., Feb. 16; thebroad.org.

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Shirin Neshat, Untitled, from Roja series, 2016. © Shirin Neshat/Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

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