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able length of yellow yarn that carpets the arboreal environment inwhich she sits. Hart notes that, “as her obsession progresses, sheknits more frantically as her fingers multiply.” 16 Mahdokht is visiblyirrational and deeply disturbed by her phobic obsession; she sitsat the unstable juncture between place and space. This unstableenvironment is at the center of the place-space dialectic: Mahdokhtremains entangled in a struggle to “plant” herself, though she islost within an unending grove.It is at this point that an overwhelmed or disoriented gallery visitormight reflect on his or her own transitional state. Havingwalked through eight galleries and as many corridors, having seenhours of video, and having been kept in a state of oscillationbetween fiction and reality, viewers are now carefully triangulatedwithin the place of this final gallery. And yet, they are still caughtin the flowing space and time of the convoluted exhibit. This environmentinitiates in the viewer the ontological crisis thatMahdokht enacts on the screen.Environment, more than the intersection of the processes ofplace and space, is itself the heart of existing between thoseprocesses. The DIA curator and exhibition designers clearly anticipatedthis environmental crisis: not only is the exhibition floorplanitself a labyrinth of enclosed places and open spaces, but iteven builds a “reflection area” in a central chamber, as if to encouragethe viewer to examine the surroundings of his or her ownbeing. Neshat’s work here—as in many works throughout heroeuvre—recasts exile not as an effect of evacuated place or conqueredspace, but as an environmental problem. As Harvey suggests,place, space, and time are three contributing, ever-changingelements that surround and define a state of being. In her multivalentrepresentations of place and space, environment and exile,Neshat asks us to consider the existential meaning of our ownintersection within these complex geographies.John J. Corso is an art critic based in metro Detroit. He is an assistantprofessor of contemporary art history and critical theory at OaklandUniversity in Rochester, Michigan.NOTES1. Shirin Neshat, artist lecture (Detroit Institute of Arts, March 27, 2013, part ofthe lecture series Global Imaginaries/Individual Realities).2. Joy Dietrich and Shirin Neshat, “Asked and Answered: Shirin Neshat,” NewYork Times Style Magazine, May 14, 2010, accessed May 1, 2013,http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/asked-and-answeredshirin-neshat3. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge,MA: Blackwell, 1996), 7.4. Ibid, 263. Emphasis original.5. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991).6. Harvey, 263.7. Ibid, 262.8. Ibid, 262.9. Ibid, 261.10. Arthur C. Danto and Marina Abramovic, Shirin Neshat (New York: Rizzoli,2010), 45.11. Lefebvre, Production, quoted in Harvey, 273.12. Klaus Ronneberger, “Henri Lefebvre and Urban Everyday Life,” in Space,Difference, Everyday Life, ed. Kanishka Goonewardena et al., (New York:Routledge, 2008), 135. Essential here is Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life(New York: Verso, 1991).13. David Harvey, “The Nature of Environment: Dialectics of Social andEnvironmental Change,” Socialist Register 29 (1993), 2.14. Shirin Neshat, artist lecture (Detroit Institute of Arts, March 27, 2013, part ofthe lecture series Global Imaginaries/Individual Realities).15. Rebecca R. Hart et al., Shirin Neshat, exh. cat. (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute ofArts, 2013), 120.16. Ibid, 120.Thanks to Rebecca R. Hart and John Cummins Steele for early access to theexhibition. Thanks also to Erin Dziedzic, J. Erin Sweeney, and Sherry WynnPerdue for their editorial assistance.OPPOSITE: Shirin Neshat in her studio, 2012 / ABOVE: Shirin Neshat, Tooba, 2002, two-channel video/audio installation, 12:42 minutes [© Shirin Neshat; courtesy of the artistand Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels]ARTPAPERS.ORG 31