ZOMORODI: In September, 2022, the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini sparked a wave of protests in Iran.Ī MARTÍNEZ: Protesters have chanted, death to the dictator and, I will kill the one who killed my sister. Police have violently broken up some of them. Therefore, we don't find the moral, emotional and political space to distance ourselves from the reality of social responsibility.ĪRI SHAPIRO: For several days now, protests have spread in Iran. The pain of the longing and the separation from your loved one and your family. If you're living outside, like me, you're faced with a life in exile. If you're living in Iran, you're facing censorship, harassment, arrest, torture, at times, execution. Every Iranian artist, in one form and another, is political. Politic doesn't seem to escape people like me. NESHAT: The story I wanted to share with you today is my challenge as an Iranian woman artist living in exile. ZOMORODI: Here's Shirin Neshat on the TED stage. And the female body is, like, a very potent, very controversial and problematic issue in my culture in Iran. But the other thing I've been very interested in is how the female body has been a contested space for political, religious and ideological rhetorics. We repressed all sense of desire, temptation. It was always connoted as a notion of sin, shame, guilt. And at least I know since my upbringing that I always had a problem with my body as a woman. NESHAT: You know, my work, for so long, has been focused on the female body in Islamic cultures. A quick warning - we discuss political violence and sexual assault but include no specific descriptions. ZOMORODI: Today on the show, the Iranian artist and TED speaker Shirin Neshat, how she became a world-renowned and controversial artist, combining photography with calligraphy and video, winning the award for best director at the Venice Film Festival and becoming a voice for Iranian and Muslim women, even though her art has never been shown in Iran. My name and the work that I make - it comes from me. I earned my freedom, and I earned the success that I brought to myself. And I'm very strong, and I'm very optimistic and I'm a survivor. But I was very lucky that I pulled myself out of this dark side. NESHAT: Those years became the foundation of the dark side of me. In fact, living in exile became the force that drove her work. ZOMORODI: And yet now, over 40 years later, Shirin Neshat is one of the most famous Iranian artists in the world, even though she never moved back. And so the last thing I could think of was my studies. And economically, I had to support myself. Mind you that this was the time I found out that I wasn't able to go back. ZOMORODI: So there she was, on her own in the U.S., her homeland in turmoil, studying art at UC Berkeley. NESHAT: I was supposed to go back, but the revolution happened. ZOMORODI: Because in 1979, while she was thousands of miles away, the Islamic Revolution began. ![]() ![]() NESHAT: I was sent to study abroad, and everything went wrong after that. ![]() ZOMORODI: But when she turned 17, her parents, like many Iranians who could afford it, wanted her to go to college in the U.S. NESHAT: My 17 years of living there in - it was very happy. ZOMORODI: Shirin Neshat grew up in Qazvin, Iran, in the 1960s and '70s. SHIRIN NESHAT: I had a very happy childhood, and we had lived in a beautiful house with beautiful gardens.
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