Art in Exile: Women Without Men 1 Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

May 31 2009

Location: 

New York City

For third world artists who are forced into exile, the creativity process could be greatly challenged due to displacement in language, community and history. Many filmmakers in exile tend to look at their connection to the homeland in strictly political terms, or give up making films overall. One of the accented artists who have faced these complexes for most of her life, Iranian-American filmmaker Shirin Neshat brought to the world her first feature film Women Without Men(2009), adapted from a magic realism novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, whose works are currently banned inside Iran. Through balancing modernist and postmodern narratives, representation of Islamic women and worldly human experience, as well as Oriental and Western art traditions, Neshat successfully created this piece of work that reconciles specificity and universality, politics and allegories. It also brought attention to a coup d'etat backed by CIA in Tehran in 1953 that many Westerners did not know of, which opens up a struggle for the larger world that transcends her own difficulties.

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