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The Complex Geographiesof Shirin NeshatTEXT / JOHN J. CORSOShirin Neshat’s first feature film, Women Without Men (2009),premiered at the Venice Film Festival and received widespreadcritical acclaim for its realistically historical and fabulistapproach. By the time of its release, Neshat had already achievedinternational renown for her photography and video installationsthat investigate Iranian history, political exile, and genderidentity in the Islamic world. Women Without Men was initiallybegun as a series of nonlinear video installations, but Neshatlater released the feature film version in hopes that its distributionwould reach a broader, more “democratic” audience. 1The film’s story comes from Shahrnush Parsipur’s eponymousbook, in which the author intertwines the disparate lives of fivewomen in Tehran, Iran. Their stories unfold against the backdropof the 1953 coup d’état that replaced the democratically electedprime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, with the autocratic Shah.Neshat concentrates on four of Parsipur’s characters, each ofwhom must wrestle individually with traumatic conflicts instigatedby different men. One of the protagonists, Munis (played byShabnam Tolouei), refuses to obey her brother’s attempts toarrange her marriage and ultimately takes her own life in protest.She returns from the dead to fight with the communist counterresistanceagainst the military regime. Meanwhile, her dearfriend Faezeh (Pegah Ferydoni) is brutally raped. In agony, thehumiliated Faezeh flees, unable to return home. She is led byMunis to a remote country estate, recently purchased by amiddle-aged woman, Farokh Legha (Arita Shahrzad), who hasleft her unhappy marriage to restore the derelict estate and itsneglected orchards. They are then joined by Zarin (Orsi Tóth), anemaciated young woman who escaped from sexual slavery in aTehran brothel, and came to live with Farokh in the old house. Ineach of these vignettes, Neshat triumphantly translates thenovel’s magical realism into haunting cinematic form.Although Parsipur’s original novel remains banned in Iran,underground piracy has enabled Neshat’s filmic version to slippast Iranian censors. 2 Thus, ironically, the film circulates throughouta country from which Neshat herself remains exiled. Neshatacknowledges that the exile she faces exceeds simple characterization.To attend to the multiple layers of her exile, I turn to thespatial differences set forth by English geographer David Harveyin his 1996 book Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference.In his treatise, Harvey has developed a manifold approach tounderstanding place, space, and environment as mutually constitutiveconcepts. According to Harvey, place establishes permanencein opposition to space’s “fluxes and flows”; environmentdescribes how place and space surround living beings. 3 It is withthese three terms that I herein explore Harvey’s aspects of geographicspace found throughout the works and in the exhibitionspaces of Neshat’s monumental midcareer retrospective, a showof work spanning more than 20 years that is currently on view atthe Detroit Institute of Arts [April 7−July 7, 2013].Neshat’s personal experiences with exile resound throughouther oeuvre and seem to oscillate between the opposing conceptsof origin and diaspora, confinement and release. Exiled from Iran,Neshat convenes with her artistic collaborators by filming inMorocco, Mexico, the United States, and Egypt, among other locations,often staging her films in public places, domestic spaces,and the natural environment. In those varied locations, Neshatapproaches exile dynamically, rejecting any effort to reduce exileto expatriation. Rather, in her photography, film, and video, theidea of geographical exile helps to invoke the abstractedprocesses that more closely relate to an integrated notion ofplace, space, and environment. Harvey describes place and spaceas codependent systems, suggesting that “since spaces, times andplaces are relationally defined by processes, they are contingentupon the attributes of processes that simultaneously define andshape what is customarily referred to as ‘environment.’” 4 Thiswork builds upon French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s Marxistdeduction that space is produced socially to maintain classinequity and capitalist hegemony. 5 Harvey expands Lefebvre’sdeduction to demonstrate that the production of space is an effectof the simultaneous productions of place and environment.Harvey further clarifies that “we cannot talk about the world of‘nature’ or of ‘environment’ without simultaneously revealinghow space and time are being constituted within such processes….” 6 Therefore, according to Harvey, place, space, and environmentare intrinsic to one another. As Neshat’s themes deal withthe unstable elements of location and exile, we are presentedwith her own views on how these three terms function. Her tendencytoward ambiguity, both in character and location, helps usunderstand the destabilized notion of place in her work, whichreveals an intertwining of place, space, and environment thatreflects Harvey’s view.Women Without Men delivers fictional documentation of theIranian state’s upheavals during the 1953 coup. Harvey regardsthe “state” as a place that defies the fluidity of space and time,defining itself in terms of geographic stability. In its struggle toINSIDE FRONT COVER: Shirin Neshat, Speechless (from Women of Allah series), 1996, 46 3/4 x 33 7/8 inches, RC print and ink / OPPOSITE: Shirin Neshat, Roja (fromThe Book of Kings series), 2012, ink on LE silver gelatin print, 60 x 45 inches [© Shirin Neshat; courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels]26 ART PAPERS