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sequent galleries of the exhibition. On the left screen, a male performerappears solo on stage, his back turned to an all-male audience,and sings what Neshat describes as “a traditional, passionatelove song with lyrics by the great Iranian mystic Rumi ….” 10 The performerfaces the viewer and the opposing screen rather than hisown audience, extending the notion of space outward and into theviewer’s domain. The male’s voice reaches the ears of the men in theaudience and is reverberated back to him in a mode of exchange. Heremains stationary as the angle of the mostly still camera anchorshim to a central place within the mise-en-scène.Subsequently, a female performer on the right screen sings outinto the same auditorium, which is now completely empty. The cameraslowly pans, tilts, and moves around to completely circle her; shefloats through space and is often engulfed in total blackness. Thesong of the chanteuse follows no discernible time signature, unlikethe male’s regimented triple meter. Rather, her guttural vocalizationstremble and stretch throughout an amorphous space-timecontinuum. In these “dueling” projected videos, the male standswithin an enclosed place, whereas the female performer personifiesopen space. Standing at the interstices of these two projections, thegallery visitor witnesses the place-space dialectic unfold literally inreal time and space and metaphorically as conflict between themale and female singers.In Turbulent, Neshat subtly investigates the relations of place andspace to capital and commerce. Again, Harvey enhances this discussionby suggesting that place and space are neither neutral norempirical processes, but rather are political ones deeply entrenchedin capitalist ideology. Citing the work of Henri Lefebvre, Harvey indicatesthat the “commodity world brings in its wake certain attitudestoward space, certain actions upon space, even a certain concept ofspace.” 11 Turbulent explores these contradictions by aligning eachgender with different socioeconomic conditions. The male performerstands before a well-attended audience. The audience is alsomale, and as such, ostensibly economically independent; this can beascertained by the men’s distribution within the audience. As theyare irregularly staggered, we may assume that they purchasedassigned seating, and thus the concert itself is staged as a capitalistaffair. Place, in such a reading, perpetuates the capitalist division oflabor and exchange. The female performer, however, sings to anempty auditorium. She is not compensated for her song, but rathersings for herself, for her pleasure. Not alienated from her own labor,she sings in an indeterminate space, free from market constraints. Intheir theoretical assessments Lefebvre and Harvey help to suggestthat the woman’s autonomous, creative space holds the key toemancipation from the capitalist confines of place. 12In addition to representations of place and space, Neshat also featuresvisual expanses of the environment in several of her works,using extreme duration shots to capture vast landscapes andseascapes. Recall that Harvey relies not on a binary structure, but ona ternary complex that unifies the processes that define place, space,OPPOSITE: Shirin Neshat, Munis, from the Women Without Men series, 2009, video stills, dimensions variable / ABOVE: Shirin Neshat, Mahdokht, 2004, three-channel video/audio installation, 13:44 minutes [© Shirin Neshat; courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels]ARTPAPERS.ORG 29