UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the early artistic production of contemporary Iranian American artist, Shirin Neshat, focusing in particular on her important breakthrough series of photographs, Women of Allah (1993-1997).

Although Women of Allah constitutes Neshat's most widely recognized and oft-reproduced production, the series' achievement remains little understood and insufficiently theorized. Opposing the prevailing tendency to read the photographs hermetically and as about the allegedly enduring vicissitudes of Muslim women's experience, this dissertation takes a wider, yet more historically specific, approach, contending that the series is insistently particular in its attempts to come to terms with the social and political consequences of Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1978-79.

Revealing Women of Allah as a project based on visual and textual citations and appropriations resonant particularly within Iranian and American contexts, this dissertation claims that the photographs construct a divided viewership, delimiting viewers according to such polarizing national distinctions -- as either "Iranian" or "American." Splitting viewers between those who can and cannot read the untranslated Iranian poems written on the photographs' surfaces, Women of Allah parallels the unresolved and combative nature of contemporary encounters between Iran and the U.S. This "superficial" split, however, also emphasizes the broader ways in which American and Iranian viewers approach Neshat's art with different frames of reference and cultural armatures, calling upon particular histories, senses and forms of knowledge -- one primarily visual, the other textual or literary, but also oral/aural and embodied.

This dissertation therefore proposes to understand meaning in Women of Allah as multi-dimensional, dynamic and dialogical. As this study explores, Women of Allah repeatedly stages hyper-charged scenarios in which the viewer and the women in the photographs face off, the photographs eliciting distinct encounters depending on the habits and capacities of their varied viewers. Appropriating and revising U.S. media representations of Iranians from the 1980s and early 90s, Women of Allah attends to the continued force that such representations command in American perceptions of, and confrontations with, Iran and Iranians today. At the same time, through its citations of well-known contemporary Iranian poetry, Women of Allah calls upon longstanding, if dynamic and ever-evolving, Iranian customary practices in which the quotation and recitation of poetry comprise a significant means of social exchange. Thus, the photographs also offer an exploratory inquiry into relations among secular and Muslim Iranians in the divided, post-revolutionary context and under the contemporary clerical Islamic regime.

Ultimately, sustained reflection upon Women of Allah reveals that it need not remain entirely divisive. Instead, insisting on recuperating historical memory within both Iran and the United States, these photographs provide bridges across national, political, cultural and religious divides, gesturing viewers toward ethical modes of engagement with Others in their world.