VENICE.- The Home of My Eyes exhibition at the Museo Correr will feature recent works by Shirin Neshat, including a selection of photographs from The Home of My Eyes series (2015), and the video Roja (2016). The Home of My Eyes series is the visual portrait of a culture. Conceived and produced by Shirin Neshat from 2014 to 2015, it comprises 55 portraits. Neshat’s new video Roja (2016), which is based on the artist’s personal dreams and memories, explores an Iranian woman’s nostalgia for connection. Employing a surrealist lens and nonlinear narrative, Roja captures feelings of displacement, blurred lines between reality and fiction, and tensions between the past and present.

Neshat’s photographic and filmic portraits investigate the psychological and emotional states of her subjects. She continues this exploration in The Home of My Eyes, a series portraying the diverse people of Azerbaijan. Neshat conceived of the series as “a portrait of a country that for so long has been a crossroads of many different ethnicities, religions, and languages.” Neshat captures her subjects’ personalities in frontal, close-up portraits. While the subjects range in age and ethnicity, Neshat unites them formally by staging them in similar clothing and poses, against a dark background. The specific hand gestures reference Christian religious paintings, most notably those of El Greco.

Azerbaijan reminded Neshat of her childhood country Iran. During production, she opened up conversations with her subjects, who answered personal questions regarding their cultural identity and the concept of home. Some referred to home as, “the feeling of being connected,” while others reflected, “I got offered to go to other places, but I could not leave.” As in many of her photographs, Neshat inscribes the silver gelatin prints with calligraphic text written in ink. The texts of The Home of My Eyes portraits are drawn from both the sitters’ responses, as well as poems by Nizami Ganjavi, a 12th century Iranian poet who lived in what is present-day Azerbaijan.

Shirin Neshat, born in the provincial capital of Qazvin in 1957, is an Iranian artist and filmmaker living in New York. Her early photographic work includes the Women of Allah series (1993-1997), which explores the question of gender in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy. Her more recent photographic series include The Book of Kings (2012) and Our House Is on Fire (2013). Each series could be seen as an allegorical representation of a country and as a group of humans unfolding in history, whether as heroes or as wounded people who survived a collective trauma.

The Home of My Eyes (2015) was commissioned by the YARAT Art Center in Baku. In 2009, Neshat directed her first feature-length film, Women Without Men, which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director during the 66th Venice International Film Festival. She is currently completing on her second feature-length film, Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017).

As a “collateral event” of the 57th International Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, the Museo Correr will present 26 of Neshat’s portraits, together with Roja, at the Sala delle Quattro Porte on the second floor within the collection at the San Marco square.

The Written Art Foundation and the Art of Writing Collection are grateful to Shirin Neshat for her extraordinary achievement to exhibit these works. The Written Art Foundation in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, was founded in 2011 to foster the Art of Writing through exhibitions, symposia and publications. It supports artists whose work allows cultures and values different from ours to inspire and to educate us— thus promoting a peaceful exchange and the idea of world citizenship. (Thomas Kellein)