A COLLECTOR’S JOURNEY AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM

Shirin Neshat (b. 1957)
Rebirth
signed, titled, numbered and dated '"Rebirth" 1994 2/10 Shirin Neshat' (on the reverse)
brush, pen and ink on gelatin silver print
13 x 8⅝in. (33 x 22cm.)
Executed in 1994, this work is number two from an edition of ten

Provenance:
Freddie Fong Gallery, San Francisco.
Private Collection, USA.
Anon. sale, Christie's New York, 17 November 2000, lot 571.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

* Please see our Conditions of Sale for definitions of cataloguing symbols.

Specialist Notes:

Fleeing her native Iran at the age of seventeen as a political exile during the Khomeini Revolution, Shirin Neshat’s art has always explored conflict at its core. Deeply affected by her country’s political history and culture, ideas around civil war and women’s rights deeply permeate the themes and content in her artistic practice. In her famous photographic series Women of Allah, the artist presents images of veiled, tattooed Muslim women holding a gun. The dissonance between the soft fabric of the veil and the cold metal of the gun, alludes to many of the contradictions and inhumanities of war.

Rebirth, created in 1994, coincides with this series. Conceived after a decade long abandonment of her art, the title of the work could also be read as the signal of her return to her practice and her rebirth as an artist. Following her tradition of mixing elegant Persian calligraphy and portrait photography, Rebirth juxtaposes the innocence of the baby and the purity of the white veil with the fluidity of the black ink. The contrast between photography as a modern medium and calligraphy as a historic practice, links the old and the new and also places Neshat’s Iranian heritage in a contemporary, Western context. ‘I remember ever since childhood growing up in Iran, I saw how text was always incorporated with decorative motifs, whether through pages in the Koran, miniature paintings, functional objects […] One summer in the early 1990s, when I went to visit Iran, as I sat in my family’s living room, being surrounded with decorative objects once again, I started to copy the patterns, and soon both the texts and the patterns showed up in my photos. It became kind of contemporary re-adaptation of what I believe was authentically an Islamic and Persian tradition’ (S. Neshat, quoted in A.C. Danto ‘Shirin Neshat and the Concept of Absolute Spirit’, in Shirin Neshat, New York 2010, p. 13).

This work is featured in our How to Collect like a Tate Curator article – find out more here.

Please note this lot is the property of a consumer. See H1 of the Conditions of Sale.