until Sunday September 08 2013
Faurschou Foundation Beijing
T : +86 10 5978 9316
798 Art District, NO2 Jiuxuanquao Road
100015 Beijing
China
The exhibition features a new body of photography works and a video installation by the acclaimed Iranian artist. Her work interweaves an austere yet sensuous visual language with music, poetry, and history, as well as the political and philosophical.
Neshat’s The Book of Kings is inspired by the epic poem “Shahnameh” (The Book of Kings), by the 11th-century poet Ferdowsi, which chronicled Iran through the 7th-century Islamic conquest of Persia. This photography series memorializes the recent Arab Spring, Iranian Green Movement, and their mass protests against corrupt regimes, honoring the martyrdom of unknown citizens who sacrificed themselves seeking justice across the Middle East.
Three groups of black and white portraits comprise this series. Hand-annotated with poetry and prison writings in Farsi calligraphy, they are “The Villains,” “The Patriots,” and “The Masses.” In these works, the individual becomes monumental and the political becomes personal.
Neshat’s interlacing of the historical and the contemporary valorizes the vulnerable yet tenacious ways that people struggle to reclaim their agency, offering striking visual and aural narratives of how the human spirit can reclaim its dignity even in the face of brutal repression.
