FORT WORTH, TX.- The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again, a survey of the internationally acclaimed artist’s work. Organized by and originating at The Broad, Los Angeles, this unprecedented exhibition is on view in Fort Worth through May 16, 2021.

Curated by Ed Schad, curator at The Broad, this exhibition surveys approximately 30 years of the multidisciplinary artist’s video works and photography, investigating Neshat’s passionate engagement with ancient and recent Iranian history, the experience of living in exile, and the human impact of political revolution.

Taking its title from a poem by the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1934–1967), I Will Greet the Sun Again begins with Neshat’s most famous body of work, Women of Allah, 1993–97. The exhibition then features her early iconic video works such as Rapture, 1999, Turbulent, 1998, and Passage, 2001; monumental photography installations including The Book of Kings, 2012, and The Home of My Eyes, 2015; and Land of Dreams, 2019, a new, ambitious work encompassing a body of photographs and two recent videos.

The exhibition journeys from works that address specific events in contemporary Iran, both before and after the Islamic Revolution, to works that increasingly use metaphor and ancient Persian history and literature to reflect on universal concerns of gender, political borders, and rootedness.

Throughout her career, Neshat has constructed metaphoric worlds in which women and men assume cultural gestures and poses, often assembling and giving voice to real people who have lived through seismic events of recent history, including the Green Movement in Iran and the Arab Spring in Egypt.

Neshat’s own seismic event was leaving Iran in 1975, when she was 17 years old, to study at the University of California at Berkeley. Due to the Islamic Revolution (1978–79) and the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88), Neshat had to continue to live outside of her home country, separated from family. Being dislocated or between cultures, politics, and worlds figures prominently throughout her work.

“Shirin Neshat has lived her life and made her art in between two different cultures, Iranian and American, and this existence has given her a poetic and penetrating ability to understand the physical and psychological borders of our world today: borders of nation, of gender, of exile, and of spirit,” said exhibition curator Ed Schad. “Whether through studying contemporary events, the deep echoes of Persian history, or the mysterious nature of dreams, Neshat vibrantly examines these borders, especially as she breaks through them.”

Andrea Karnes, senior curator at the Modern, said, “As a prominent woman artist with a particular vision that has to do with her own life experience of being torn from her homeland, Neshat’s narratives reach so many, and they do so in the most beautiful and poignant of ways. We have long been admirers of Neshat and her powerful work.”

About this exhibition, Neshat said, “Andrea Karnes and I have been in conversation for several years about the possibility of bringing my work to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, one of the most exquisite museums in America, with an outstanding exhibition program and iconic architecture. Finally, a dream comes true, and one of the largest surveys of my career will travel to Texas, to a community that is largely unfamiliar with my art. Personally, the timing of this exhibition could not have been more relevant following an unforgettable year of racial, socio-political, and health crises. In essence, thematically every work I have made so far, from the earliest series of Women of Allah (1993–97), a body of work which questioned tyranny, violence, and political injustice in respect to my own birth country of Iran, to the latest multimedia project Land of Dreams (2019), exploring my experience as an immigrant in America, will offer an emotional, historical, and political journey of a nomadic artist who has spent much of her life in exile and who is perpetually conflicted in between Eastern and Western values and her Iranian and American identities.”