A vivid and compelling collection of quotations from the influential contemporary artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat

Neshat-isms is an exciting collection of quotations from award-winning Iranian-American visual artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat. Her experiences of loss and grief as an Iranian woman living in exile are central themes of her work in photography, video, and film. She is known for her outspoken advocacy for Iranian women and human rights, and for poetic and politically charged images and narratives that raise questions about power, religion, race, and gender. Gathered from interviews, talks, and writings, these powerful and thought-provoking quotations showcase the voice of one of the most important artists of our time.

• Through my work I have continued to defy and resist the Western clichéd image of Iranian women as passive victims. While acknowledging the repressive situation in Iran, I have continued to represent Iranian women as empowered, courageous, defiant, and rebellious.
• Every Iranian artist, in one form or another, is political. Politics has defined our lives.
• I've done a lot of work about women in a state of madness, where ultimately they find a kind of freedom.
• You can't demystify a myth.

A multimedia portrait of a fictional woman artist caught between two cultures

In her latest body of work, multimedia artist Shirin Neshat (born 1957) turns her focus to the American West. With more than 100 photographs, a two-channel video installation and a feature film, Neshat creates a multilayered look at contemporary America through the eyes of a fictionalized artist. Monumental black-and-white photographs are transformed through Neshat's use of Farsi text and images that have been hand-drawn onto the picture. The texts represent Neshat's interpretation of the dreams of the sitter, with references to ancient myths and ideologies. Neshat works and experiments with photography, video and film, imbuing them with highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives that question issues of power, religion, race, gender and the relationship between the past and present, occident and orient, individual and collective through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian woman living in exile.

In this book and the exhibition it accompanies, Shirin Neshat (born 1957) looks at the connections between ancient history and the politics of the present in works that employ photography, calligraphy, poetry and filmmaking to explore the primal concepts of violence, passion and love that drive human history. These include the various photographic series Neshat produced in the early 1990s and two video installations that address the historical, cultural and political realities on which the artist has focused for the past 30 years. In the photographic series Women of Allah (1993-97), the artist expresses her position on the situation in Iran following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. In her more recent series, The Book of Kings (2012) and Our House Is on Fire (2013), Neshat responds to political events throughout the Arab world, capturing the emotions of people she met after the Arab Spring.

New York-based Iranian artist Shirin Neshat (born 1957) has continually addressed the social and political climate in her native country, particularly the status of women. Dreamers Trilogy documents three such video works from her current series: Illusions & Mirrors, 2013; Roja, 2016; and Sarah, 2016.

Dreams are universal.

An air of confidence and vibrancy, but also vulnerability and fragility surround the works of the Iranian artist, photographer, and filmmaker Shirin Neshat (b. Qazvin, 1957; lives and works in New York). Central themes in Neshat's art are identity, origin, and power structures. Her works are defined by a melding and broadening of the rich visual traditions of Persian and Western art. The US-based artist's work is now the subject of the museum's first presentation in association with the Written Art Collection.

Neshat's most recent work, Land of Dreams (2019), revolves around Persian calligraphy and Western canon of portraiture and combines for the fist time the media of photography and video in a single work. Combining documentary and fictional elements, it scrutinizes the American dream and its flipsides. The artist conducted interviews with the portrayed, asking them about their dreams, and then integrated summaries in Persian into the photographs together with traditional visual motifs. Interweaving writing, gestural expression, and formal variety achieves a rhythmical poetic density as it gathers individual narratives that reflect universal human experiences. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition puts the focus on the conjunction of writing and image. With a preface by Bernhard Maaz and the Written Art Collection, essays by Sussan Babaie and Judith Csiki, and an interview with the artist by Judith Csiki.

In 2019, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen concluded a cooperation agreement with the Written Art Collection, which dedicates itself to informal, gestural, calligraphic, and writing-based forms of expression in visual art media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The works collected by the Written Art Collection are originate from the Western world, East Asia, and the Middle East and expand the collecting and research program of the Sammlung Moderne Kunst in the Pinakothek der Moderne.

Dreams are universal.

An air of confidence and vibrancy, but also vulnerability and fragility surround the works of the Iranian artist, photographer, and filmmaker Shirin Neshat (b. Qazvin, 1957; lives and works in New York). Central themes in Neshat's art are identity, origin, and power structures. Her works are defined by a melding and broadening of the rich visual traditions of Persian and Western art. The US-based artist's work is now the subject of the museum's first presentation in association with the Written Art Collection.

Neshat's most recent work, Land of Dreams (2019), revolves around Persian calligraphy and Western canon of portraiture and combines for the fist time the media of photography and video in a single work. Combining documentary and fictional elements, it scrutinizes the American dream and its flipsides. The artist conducted interviews with the portrayed, asking them about their dreams, and then integrated summaries in Persian into the photographs together with traditional visual motifs. Interweaving writing, gestural expression, and formal variety achieves a rhythmical poetic density as it gathers individual narratives that reflect universal human experiences.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition puts the focus on the conjunction of writing and image with a special focus on the series Roja (2016), The Home of My Eyes (2015), The Book of Kings (2012), and Possessed (2001). With a preface by Bernhard Maaz, essays by Sussan Babaie, Christian Boehringer, Judith Csiki and Thomas Kellein, and an interview with the artist by Judith Csiki.