The Artist: Shirin Neshat Has No Time for Certainty

For Shirin Neshat, Venice is a city of milestones. It was here, at the Biennale in 1999, that her moving two-screen installation Turbulent won the Golden Lion, an accolade that confirmed the Iranian-born artist’s international arrival. 

Ten years later, she returned to claim the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival with her feature debut, Women Without Men. She returned to the floating Italian city this year with Do U Dare!, a trilogy of films extending the themes that have shaped her work for more than three decades: exile, transnational identity, political violence and the fragile spaces between them.

Do U Dare!, installed beneath the pristine ceiling frescoes of the Palazzo Marin, was drowned out by the noise of this year’s Biennale, with artists, curators and national pavilions competing to stake out ever clearer political positions. The irony is that Neshat has spent her entire career making work from the position of dissidence, yet has steadfastly resisted the certainty that politics increasingly demands.

“My work has always been about paradoxes and dualities,” she says. “It’s about women who are very submissive and quiet, but who can also be extremely rebellious and outspoken and defiant.” It is an idea that runs through Do U Dare!, whose protagonist moves between black-and-white reality and a vividly coloured interior world. But it also describes Neshat’s wider practice. Rather than offering slogans or manifestos, her films and photographs inhabit a space of ambiguity, where competing truths can exist simultaneously, leaving viewers to navigate their own moral terrain.

Born in Qazvin in 1957, Neshat left Iran before the Islamic Revolution to study art in California. When she returned more than a decade later, she found a country transformed by the regime. The experience would shape the rest of her career. Her landmark photographic series Women of Allah (1993–97), with its veiled women, Farsi calligraphy and unsettling interplay of beauty, martyrdom and violence, established many of the themes she would continue to explore: exile and belonging, religion and secularism, power and resistance, public identity and private experience.

Those images were frequently read in the West as statements about Iran. Yet Neshat has always resisted such binary interpretations. “I’ve always been very careful about my work not being propaganda,” she says. “I’m interested in a more enigmatic, poetic way of approaching even political ideas.”

Her work is rarely interested in choosing sides. Instead, it inhabits the territory in between, where certainty gives way to contradiction and political conviction is filtered through allegory, symbolism and surrealist narratives. It is why her films often feel less like arguments than moral landscapes, inviting viewers to occupy competing perspectives rather than resolving them.

If Women of Allah established Neshat as one of the foremost artistic interpreters of post-revolutionary Iran, the decades since have steadily expanded her field of vision. Works such as Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Women Without Men (2004) retained Iran as both subject and metaphor, but more recent projects, including Land of Dreams (2021), The Fury (2022) and now Do U Dare!, have increasingly turned their gaze towards America, seen through the eyes of an exile.

What has changed is less the political charge of Neshat’s work than the direction in which it is aimed. Women of Allah, made after her return to Iran in the early 1990s, was widely received in the West as an account of Muslim women under the Islamic Republic. Yet the photographs resist any simple division between oppression and resistance. The women they depict are veiled and armed, vulnerable and confrontational; Persian poetry is inscribed across faces, hands and feet, complicating already loaded images. 

Shirin Neshat, Do U Dare!, 2025 (film still). Courtesy the artist, Gladstone, and Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan/Naples

Now, having lived outside Iran for most of her adult life, she has become wary of being positioned as its representative. Her later work increasingly displaces political history into fiction, myth and individual experience. Women Without Men, adapted from Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel and set against the 1953 US- and British-backed coup in Iran, approaches national trauma through the lives of four women. Historical violence remains present, but it is refracted through dreams, desires and private rebellions rather than presented as an argument about the nation.

“It’s appealing to people with the language of poetry as opposed to propaganda,” Shirin says, talking about her approach more generally. Art allows her to move away from ideological rhetoric and back towards pain, vulnerability and what she calls “the core of their humanity”.

The distinction matters because Neshat does not regard beauty as a retreat from politics. Her films are meticulously composed and rich in music, choreography and visual symbolism. They often move at the pace of ritual. That formal control has sometimes exposed her to criticism: that political suffering is being rendered too aesthetically. But the charge underestimates the aggression contained within the seduction. Beauty draws viewers into situations whose contradictions are not easily escaped.

Outside the work, however, Neshat’s refusal of fixed positions has become increasingly difficult to maintain. She has never been reticent about her opposition to the Islamic Republic. But she is equally resistant to the idea that opposition to the regime requires support for the military intervention launched against the Iranian state by Israel and the US launched in February of this year. As an Iranian exile, she finds herself caught between the government that drove her from her country and the Western powers presenting themselves as its potential liberators.

The contradiction became painfully public when Neshat attended an antiwar demonstration in New York earlier this year. Photographs circulated on social media that appeared to show her among protesters carrying symbols associated with the Islamic Republic. “I would NEVER attend a pro-Islamic regime protest, I despise them,” she wrote on Instagram, explaining that she had joined a large antiwar march and that manipulated images were giving a false impression of her position.

The clarification did little to calm the response. Some commenters accused her of lending legitimacy to the regime; others argued that an artist who had built an international career representing Iranian women owed those women an unequivocal political allegiance. Others defended her right to reject the terms of that argument. The dispute exposed a fault line extending far beyond Neshat herself: between Iranians who regard foreign military intervention as the only plausible route to removing the regime and those who believe it would destroy the country without delivering freedom.

For Neshat, the encounter confirmed how little space remains for tolerance, nuance and ambivalence. She condemns the Islamic Republic without qualification, but equally rejects the proposition that Iran can be liberated through bombardment. “I need to stand on my two feet and say I’m against this war and I’m against this government,” she says. Her instinct was initially to withdraw. “I don’t like conflict,” she says, describing the aggression directed towards her online. “I need to just put everything into my work and not be out, being so public.” Yet she also recounts responding privately to some of her critics, asking whether they could speak without attacking one another. Several conversations ensued, and the tone softened. People who had approached her as enemies began talking to her “in a really peaceful way”. The experience, she says, demonstrated the possibility of recovering dialogue once people cease performing their positions before an audience.

This friction between public identity and private vulnerability is also at the centre of Do U Dare!. The three-film installation is loosely inspired by Nasim Aghdam, the Iranian-born vegan activist and social-media performer who entered YouTube’s headquarters in California in 2018, shot and wounded three people and then killed herself. Neshat was drawn less to the violence than to Aghdam’s divided existence. In public she was isolated, withdrawn and almost invisible; online she was charismatic, provocative and theatrically self-possessed.

Neshat recognised something of herself in that split. “My art has been my saviour,” she says. Like Aghdam, she describes feeling isolated from both Iranian and American cultures. She says she discovered through art: “This third place where you feel free and you are finally able to express yourself”. The comparison is not intended to absolve or explain Aghdam’s violence, nor does the trilogy function as biography. Instead, Neshat uses her story as a point of entry into questions that have preoccupied her throughout her career: how power is constructed through images, how marginalised people invent alternative selves, how fantasy can become both a refuge and a form of dissent.

Across the trilogy, a solitary female protagonist passes through three American landscapes: the economically strained streets of Bushwick in Brookyln, the corporate environment of Wall Street and the melancholy uniformity of an anonymised suburb. Public life is rendered in black-and-white. When the protagonist enters an interior realm, the images erupt into colour and magic realism. The passive observer becomes an avenging or transformative figure: breaking a camera, moving an emotionally anaesthetised audience to tears, finding freedom within the private theatre of her own image-making.

The formal dualities are recognisably Neshat’s – but the political terrain has shifted. If her early work was shaped by the shock of returning to a transformed Iran, her recent films increasingly scrutinise her adopted country. “For the past many years, my lens has turned towards America,” she says. “As I have now lived here longer than in my own country, my work is really being very critical of this culture and this society.”

Neshat is particularly scathing about the gap between the rhetoric of American freedom and the treatment of those who seek refuge there. In Do U Dare!, the first film’s damaged mannequins and broken bodies evoke a world of violence converted into spectacle. The second places its protagonist before an emotionally vacant corporate audience where her voice becomes the instrument through which their suppressed feeling is released. The third retreats into the domestic and digital space where identity is performed, edited and intensified. None offers a programme for political action. Together, they point to a society in which public language has become hollow, images mediate power and private imagination may be the only remaining site of agency.

Neshat traces the sharper turn in her criticism of the US partly to the war in Gaza and American support for Israel. She describes being deeply affected by the disparity between the country’s invocation of freedom and human rights and its complicity in violence elsewhere. But her argument is not that America and Iran are identical. It is that the exile who escapes one system of domination may become newly alert to the hypocrisies of another. Art becomes “the only place of safety” from which both can be questioned, she says.

Her protagonists become capable of actions that their ordinary lives deny them. They sing, resist, accuse, enchant or destroy. In assuming another woman’s story, Neshat also finds a freedom unavailable to her as a public figure. “By telling somebody else’s narrative, I’m actually saying my own narrative,” she says. “By going under her skin, I can be much more aggressive.”

Shirin Neshat, Do U Dare!, 2025 (installation view). Photo: Stefano Tacchinardi. Courtesy the artist and Associazione Genesi

The admission helps explain why she resists the confessional directness demanded by social media. An artwork permits disguise. Through allegory she can say more, not less. Ambiguity is not evasiveness but a method of approaching realities that slogans cannot contain.

There is, nonetheless, a fragility in Neshat’s faith in what art can accomplish. During our conversation, which took place as the US was bombing Iran, she describes waking to frightening messages, being unable to reach relatives, then walking outside on a beautiful spring morning. “Let me believe in the value of art,” she would say to herself. “Let me believe that there is hope at the end of this dark tunnel.”

It would be easy to characterise that belief as idealism. Neshat does so herself, wondering whether it is merely “the stupid wish of an artist” to move people sufficiently that, for a moment, hostility gives way to feeling. Yet her work has never claimed that art can resolve conflict. Its ambition is more limited and perhaps more demanding: to interrupt certainty, to make competing realities visible, to restore human complexity where ideology has stripped it away.

That is why her quietness should not be mistaken for caution. Neshat may recoil from personal confrontation but she has never sought to make harmless work. “I don’t like conflict,” she says. “But I do want to make work that is as sharp as a knife.”