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establish permanence, Harvey adds, the state enlists the shiftingprocesses that define space. He writes: “States have been carved outas entities historically … from the flow of multiple intersecting spatialprocesses. They are bounded and isolated as entities from theirenvironments and acquire a certain permanence through institutionsthat assure their character and internal integrity.” 7 Becausestates rely on an irrefutable claim to place, they promote an imageof permanence to maintain the authority of their borders. ButHarvey notes the irony of the desire for a well-defined territory. Heshows that while the state must establish irrefutable borders, it is“perpetually undermined” by spatial processes marked by instabilityand flow. 8 Like Harvey, Neshat shows that place can exist only inrelation to space.In her photographic work, Neshat graphically renders the codependentprocesses of place, space, and time by conjoining two-,three-, and four-dimensional representations within the same flatframe. At first glance, the coexistence of these four dimensions maygo unnoticed. In her series Women of Allah (1993–1997), the femalesitters dressed in black chadors appear fixed within a shallow depthof field. Given the absence of context, these photographs seem torecord a discontinuous, isolated moment. Within this tight visualconfine, the subjects are further suspended in a single instance bythe artist’s direct approach; each sitter poses with a gun or riflepointed directly at the camera lens, and by extension, that confrontationreveals the interrelated complexities of time and spacewithin these images.In the Women of Allah images, as in her more recent series TheBook of Kings (2012), Neshat presents close-up portraits in which hersitters appear to be adorned with henna. In fact, Neshat has handscribedPersian calligraphy directly onto the photographs. Its applicationin The Book of Kings is stylistically finer and responds moresympathetically to the bodily contours of each figure than it does inthe Women of Allah series. The portraits’ severely compressed depthof field and the “illustrated” surfaces recall the flatness of book illuminations,Persian miniatures, and even the typefaced columns of anewspaper (The Book of Kings was created to pay tribute to the prodemocracyparticipants of the Green Revolution, also known as theArab Spring). The script further flattens the already shallow space ofthe photographs and helps to reconnect aspects of space with time,as each handwritten line of text provides a physical record ofNeshat’s prolonged interaction with the images. Influenced byWalter Benjamin’s argument that mechanical reproduction destroysthe historical specificity of an artwork—a specificity he equatedwith ritualistic “aura” of the fetish—many photographers haveturned to the medium for its ability to transcend historical uniquenessand traceable provenance. Neshat undermines this strategy:she restores an element of uniqueness⎯as well as a discernibleprovenance⎯to her photographs by applying handwritten text totheir surfaces. Her multimedia images thus weave together severaldimensional representations: the sitters appear in three dimensions,while the photograph flattens their image, and simultaneously theadded text introduces the passage of time, a culmination redolent ofHarvey’s views on the interdependence of place, space, and time.By bringing together three different means of representing themultiple dimensions of space-time, Neshat complicates the understandingof place as a product of spatiotemporal terms. Harvey notesthat “the process of place formation is a process of carving out ‘permanences’from the flow of processes creating space.” 9 Place strugglesagainst the incessant flow of space-time in order to claim aconcrete plane or mode of permanence. This dialectical strugglebetween place and space often manifests in Neshat’s video installationsas a struggle between male and female forces. At the DetroitInstitute of Arts exhibition, the first installation that visitorsencounter is Neshat’s Turbulent (1998), a diptych video installationpresented laterally along the parallel walls of a darkened corridor.Viewers must engage directly with this piece in order to access sub-28 ART PAPERS