01 work, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Shirin Neshat's Unveiling, with Footnotes #187

Shirin Neshat (Iranian, B. 1957)

Unveiling, from the Women of Allah series, c. 1993)

Ink on gelatin silver print

59 7/8 x 39¼in. (152 x 101cm.)

Whitney Museum of American Art

In the present work, the woman stands still, appears silent yet confident and her gaze captivates the viewer. The Farsi words, amalgams of poems and prose by the Iranian writers Forough Farokhzad and Tahereh Saffarzadeh, ornament the woman's body, but they are not only decorative as they define the woman's quest for self-expression and reveal the symbolic voice of the silent figure. The womans skin becomes the canvas on which Shirin Neshat expresses her feelings towards feminism and questions the intricate identity of women in today's society. More on this painting

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian artist living in exile. Some of her work is more poetic than overtly political, but she makes clear that “politics doesn’t seem to escape people like me,” using “art as her weapon” for social commentary.

This photograph is one of her earliest works from the Women of Allah series, exploring the female’s role in Islamic fundamentalism and militancy in Iran. It appears to speak to 18th and 19th-century Orientalist painting that fantasized Middle-Eastern women as subject to the male gaze, as nude posessions surrounded by material goods. But Neshat’s sitters gaze boldly back, often holding guns, freeing the female body from this objectification. More on Shirin Neshat

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