Image: Krakow Witkin Gallery, Boston
The presentation includes the photograph ‘Crowd from Front,’ ‘Woman Leaving’ from the ‘Fervor’ series, and ‘Way in Way out’ from ‘Women of Allah.’ The presentation examines gender, desire, religious and political space, memory, and liberation.
Neshat has described ‘Fervor’ as focusing on the problematic of temptation and desire, including the ways sexual taboos become deeply internalized. In that description, men and women can experience conflict between their natural, biological tendencies and their moral and religious ideas.
Neshat’s trilogy of films, ‘Turbulent,’ ‘Rapture,’ and ‘Fervor,’ was created between 1998 and 2000. She presented each work on two screens, with the narratives unfolding simultaneously from parallel gender perspectives. The films and related photographic works are described as containing groups of women and men that are far from uniform or static and that bristle with individual energies.
The subject of the exhibited work is clad entirely in white and kneels in the traditional posture of Islamic prayer, while a black rifle lies at her side. Running up the hem of her robe, Neshat has inscribed a fragment of a piece by the modern Iranian poet Tahereh Saffarzadeh.
One viewer might read the work as depicting religious militancy, while another might connect the woman’s expression and gesture with the sense of longing in the text.
