Shirin Neshat: Passage

In conjunction with the 2006 Virginia Film Festival, Revelations: Finding God at the Movies. Exhibition sponsored by the FUNd at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation.

In her photographs and films, internationally acclaimed New York-based artist Shirin Neshat explores the role of women in Islamic society. Born in Iran, she lived in exile in the United States during the 1979 Revolution, unable to return to her homeland until 1993. Her work is effused with a sense of displacement as she addresses tensions between ideology and individuality in symbolically-charged images of mysterious beauty.

In conjunction with the Virginia Film Festival’s theme Revelations: Finding God at the Movies, Second Street presents Neshat’s widely heralded video installation Passage (2001), a work that was commissioned by avant-garde composer Philip Glass. The 11-minute piece presents funerary preparations and a procession through breathtaking panoramas of a stark landscape at the water’s edge. Glass’s orchestration punctuates the ritualized movements of two groups: men carrying a corpse and women in chadors, the head-to-toe black coverings of orthodox Muslim women, digging a grave in the sand with their hands. Ultimately, the work culminates in the elemental, where dust, stones, and fire become metaphors for life, death, and the hope of renewal.

Neshat’s work has been presented around the world and is in the collections of such major institutions as those of the Guggenheim Museum, and the Tate Gallery, London. SSG’s presentation of Passage represents Neshat’s Mid-Atlantic debut.

Passage
Video by Shirin Neshat