Shirin Neshat: The Last Word — Hamid Dabashi's Official Website
Hamid Dabashi

Shirin Neshat: The Last Word

Image: Cover scan of the book "Shirin Neshat: The Last Word"
A work by Shirin Neshat
A work by Shirin Neshat

It is almost a decade since I wrote my very first essay on Shirin Neshat. Quite by serendipity, I had just seen a collection of her photographs in Venice Biennale in August 1995, where I happened to be and where I accidentally walked into a room in one of the Biennale venues and saw her pictures hanging on the wall next to a window overlooking one of the main canals. Soon after that, in May 1996, I run into Shirin Neshat herself (not knowing who she was) in the lobby of Walter Reade Theater at the Lincoln Center in New York during a major retrospective of Abbas Kiarostami that Richard Peña had organized. Here she was—with a huge portfolio of her work, almost as tall as her own height, showing her work to a friend when I accidentally saw her and her pictures and was quite surprised to discover that these were the pictures I had seen the year before in Venice. We soon stroke up a conversation, and after that an enduring friendship ensued. Soon after that encounter, I wrote my first essay on Shirin Neshat’s work, “The Gun and the Gaze,” for the first volume of her selected photographs, Women of Allah (1997).

The 46th Venice Biennale (1995), in which I saw Shirin Neshat’s work for the first time, was the first major group exhibition of her work. Soon after that other major exhibitions, both solo and in group, followed—chief among them the 10th Biennale of Sydney (1996), Ljubljana Museum of Modern Art (1997), the 5th International Istanbul Biennale (1997), the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997), Tate Gallery of Modern Art (1998), the Art Institute of Chicago (1999), the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), Kunsthalle Wien (2000), the 3rd Kwangju Biennale (2000), Whitney Biennale, Whitney Museum of American Art (2000), Kanazawa Citizen’s Art Center (2001), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2001), Valencia Biennial (2001), Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (2002), Documenta 11 (2002), and Sanctuary, Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art (2003). The span of time between her first and most recent work, between 1995 and 2005, covers a decade of the most radical and drastic events of our current history. Art has always had a specific social setting. But specific social settings have been scarcely so global in their consequences.

(From Hamid Dabashi’s “Shirin Neshat: Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography”)

Copyright ©2009-2024 Hamid Dabashi. All rights reserved.
Array ( [2] => Array ( [title] => [text] => "A leading cultural observer." Washington Post "Our most prominent intellectual." Shirin Neshat "Renowned Columbia University scholar on Iranian culture." Boston Globe "Spectacular, important, and incisive. Dabashi's work is crucial for our times." Zillah Eisenstein
Ithaca College, NY
"Hamid Dabashi lovingly writes about the history of Iran that teaches us how to understand a people overshadowed by the grand narratives of political (mis)representation." Gayatri Spivak
Columbia University
"You are with a humanist who deeply loves his country, and invites you to feel very much at home." Susan Buck-Morss
Cornell University
"Superb authority... Dabashi provides a tour de force on Iranian art, politics and culture." Shirin Neshat "Great erudition and imagination... bringing out rich aspects of Iranian culture that are little known or not recognized." Vanessa Martin, Royal Holloway
University of London
"Hamid Dabashi, is one of the most significant intellectual voices outside of Iran since the Islamic revolution." Shirin Neshat "A leading light in Iranian studies." The Chronicle of Higher Education "Cuts through the myths, past and present, that Americans have been told about Iran... presenting Iran's history through the lens of its literary cosmopolitanism." Susan Buck-Morss
Cornell University
"Magisterial." Houchang Chehabi
Boston University
"An important man in New York." Sir Ridley Scott "Much-needed in our troubled times." Gayatri Spivak
Columbia University
"Exemplary of a new Leftist discourse that is undogmatic and non-sectarian... open and intimate." Susan Buck-Morss
Cornell University
"Hamid Dabashi beautifully lays out the alluring dynamic between Iranian art and politics." Shirin Neshat "A rare cultural critic." Mohsen Makhmalbaf "Dabashi's passion and extraordinary vision, gives us the knowledge and commitment to stand against war and build the possibilities for peace and global justice." Zillah Eisenstein
Ithaca College, NY
"Hamid Dabashi's piercing revelations have been as instrumental in fashioning my own films as have Scorsese, Rossellini and Bresson." Ramin Bahrani "Superb and brilliant." Bruce Lawrence
Duke University
"Fresh, provocative and iconoclastic." Ian Richard Netton
University of Leeds, UK
"Learned... sparkles with verve and a sometimes punishing wit. Hamid Dabashi is the perfect guide." Edward W. Said "There are few better places to begin than with Dabashi's subtle and vividly presented wealth on Iran." Said Amir Arjomand
SUNY, New York
"Objective and empathetic... unlike many others on contemporary Iran." Ervand Abrahamian
Baruch College, New York
"Enthusiastic... clear and accurate... impressive." Oliver Leaman
Liverpool John Moores University, UK
"Original, creative and insightful." John L. Esposito
Georgetown University
"Extraordinary." Daniel Brumberg
Georgetown University
"Dabashi has an astonishing ability to range over some of the most complex issues of modern intellectual life." Sudipta Kaviraj
Columbia University
"If anyone can lay claim to Nima Yushij's statement that this world is his home, it is Hamid Dabashi. I want a very broad readership to know the quality of his writing and thinking, of his immense epistemic and historical scholarship." Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Columbia University
"Dabashi is learned, poetic, ranging from philosophy to film, every word written with a commitment to the possibility of a just world. I have worked with him in the past and will work with him again in the future." Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Columbia University
"Hamid Dabashi is one of the foremost exponent today of postcolonial critical theory, whose work deserves to be called post-colonial with all the multivalence of this description." Sudipta Kaviraj
Columbia University
"Hamid Dabashi's writings on Iranian culture and politics brilliantly re-imagine the rich heritage of a shared past and a conflicted present. His reflections on revolution and nationhood, poetry and cinema, philosophy and the sacred, are urgent, provocative, complex, and highly original." Timothy Mitchell
Columbia University
"Equally fluent in philosophical reasoning, literary interpretation, visual hermeneutics and writing with a rare combination of penetration and lyricism, Dabashi's work continues values of both modern critical theory and the highly sophisticated and subtle intellectual traditions of Iranian... reflection -- for both of which he is an wonderfully sympathetic reader." Sudipta Kaviraj
Columbia University
"Hamid Dabashi belongs to a marvelous tradition of poetic thinkers, whose deep insights are crafted in magnificent poetic prose." Gilbert Achcar
University of London
"Dabashi provides his readers with the wine of literary pleasure along with rich food for thought." Gilbert Achcar
University of London
"In Dabashi's work, post-coloniality does not mean a denial or denunciation of the modern European tradition of philosophy and social theory, but their effortless absorption into a larger, more complex reflection." Sudipta Kaviraj
Columbia University
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