Shirin Neshat
«Tooba»

Like in the majority of Neshat’s video works, one observes a decelerated sense of time and «how Shirin Neshat fights the terror-ridden breathlessness of [global] money-culture» with a consciously reclaimed sense of time», states art historian Horst Bredekamp. The pathos and urgency of this two-canal video projection, first shown at the documenta 11, connects with archaic rituals—here with the pilgrimage to a primordial tree in a barren landscape, there with the enlargement of a woman’s face. Where Bill Viola might be said to repeatedly reach out for the same coded messages of human existence, most characteristic of the works of the Iranian Neshat is her grip on the unbroken visual power of a traditional and hierarchically-structured society. That she likewise lends the women of this society a voice and visual space of their own, as done in «Turbulent» (1998), denotes the decisive difference to an unhistorical reconsideration of archaic truths.

Rudolf Frieling