Aziz Art May 2016

After graduating school, she moved
to New York and married a Korean
curator, Kyong Park,who was the
director and founder of Storefront
for Art and Architecture, a nonprofit
organization.Neshat helped
Park run the Storefront, where she
was exposed to many different
ideologies and it would become a
place where she received a much
needed experience with and
exposure to concepts that would
later become integral to her
artwork.
During this time, she did not make
any serious attempts at creating
art, and the few attempts were
subsequently destroyed. In 1990,
she returned to Iran. "It was
probably one of the most shocking
experiences that I have ever had.
The difference between what I had
remembered from the Iranian
culture and what I was witnessing
was enormous. The change was
both frightening and exciting;
I had never been in a country that
was so ideologically based. Most
noticeable, of course, was the
change in people's physical
appearance and public behavior
Education
In 1975, Neshat left Iran to study
art at UC Berkeley and completed
her BA, MA and MFA.
Work
Neshat’s earliest works were
photographs, such as the Unveiling
(1993) and Women of Allah
(1993–97) series, which explore
notions of femininity in relation to
Islamic fundamentalism and
militancy in her home country. As a
way of coping with the discrepancy
between the culture that she was
experiencing and that of the prerevolution
Iran in which she was
raised, she began her first mature
body of work, the Women of Allah
series, portraits of women entirely
overlaid by Persian calligraphy.
Her work refers to the social,
cultural and religious codes of
Muslim societies and the
complexity of certain oppositions,
such as man and woman. Neshat
often emphasizes this theme
showing two or more coordinated
films concurrently,