Shirin Neshat, Art Gallery of New South Wales, to 29 Jan 2006.

Start with a whinge or two…
Firstly, this is a very small exhibition, I was expecting more from a show at the Sydney Festival/AGNSW. Whilst at least two of her films have been seen in Sydney in recent years, including Turbulent (1998) at the AGNSW (for which there is a still photograph is this exhibition), It feels slight to have only one film in the exhibition and it was hoped that seeing a few together would enable further insight into her work.

Secondly the sound is terrible, why does a cinematic video work not include cinematic sound. It is not just that the sound has been set up to fail but it is so quite I actually could not hear it and as such have no idea of the quality of the soundtrack. The work must have been installed by someone with very sensitive ears or there is another reason for this. Sitting in the space I can clearly hear what is happening outside and this strongly distracts from the work. It also means the rather noisy projects are much loader than the soundtrack

Now I have gotten that off my chest the work ‘Tooba’ (2002) is a typically powerful work by Neshat, who is easily one of the most existing artist currently working with video. The installation is typical of her work, two screens that face off each other. The audience sits to the side or in the middle and watches (backward and forwards) the two screens. At times they are in time but different angles and sometime stories are told across the projections. This means one is never sure they have fully seen and grasped all the stories and images and requires perhaps three to four viewing to be certain (as it is less than 13 minutes long this is a possibility).



The imagery is typically breath taking filled with greys, grey browns & grey blues. The landscape, set around the Mexican villages of Tiracoz and Cuilapan, is large, hilly and barren except for the rather wonderful tree that forms the visual focus of the work.

Throughout the work we watch the villagers, the men make their way to the tree, watch it and finally join it. Again in typical Neshat fashion these faces are wonderfully gouged out by age. They dress in similar black suits and white shirts, all with similar blank expressions. They look to be thinking hard, focused on the tree.

All of these elements go to make up the extremely powerful style of Neshat, one simply doesn’t walk away from these works, they stick for years. The simple cinema style, with simple or even slight narrative and the beauty of the cinematography points to the possibility of a truly art driven cinema.

.kk