EventsThe New Social Environment#228

Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari with Charles Shafaieh

Friday, February 5, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Artists and filmmakers Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari join journalist and critic Charles Shafaieh. We conclude with a poetry reading from Ben Fama.

In this Talk

Shirin Neshat

Photo by Lyle Ashton Harris

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Working across photography, video, film, and opera, she explores themes of power, religion, gender, and cultural identity through her experience as an Iranian woman in exile. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including at The Broad, the Hirshhorn Museum, and Museo Correr. Neshat’s films include Women Without Men (Silver Lion, 2009), Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017), and Land of Dreams(2021). She directed Aida at the Salzburg Festival (2017, 2022) and will restage it at the Paris Opera in 2025. Her honors include Golden Lion and Praemium Imperiale Awards.

shirin__neshat

Shoja Azari

Portrait drawing of Shoja Azari by Phong H. Bui

An Iranian-born visual artist and filmmaker. Azari confronts broad themes of gender, politics, and piety, drawing inspiration from and re-interpreting religious icons. While collaborating with Shirin Neshat on a wealth of film and video projects, Azari created experimental and art house films, including an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s work, K and a series of short films, Windows, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Azari and Neshat’s film Women Without Men won the Silver Lion for best director at the 2009 Venice Film Festival. Azari has since developed a style of “video paintings” that combine media to produce a unique three-dimensional effect. His work has been exhibited globally and is included in international permanent collections.

Charles Shafaieh

Photo by Rahi Rezvani

Editor-at-large for the Brooklyn Rail, Charles Shafaieh’s writing on theatre, visual art, literature, film, and music has appeared in numerous international publications including The New Yorker, Artforum, The Irish Times, and The Weekend Australian Review. Originally from Montana and now based in New York City, he writes regularly on opera for Opera News and on architecture and design for Harvard Design Magazine. His essays have also appeared in multiple books, such as The Touch: Spaces Designed for the Senses (gestalten 2019). With the Brooklyn Public Library, he co-curates Litfilm, an annual film festival focused on writers.

https://www.shafaieh.com/

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

https://www.daostrom.com/

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨