Shirin Neshat Artwork
Ilgara, from The Home of My Eyes series, 2015.
Portraying the diverse people of Azerbaijan, Shirin Neshat’s The Home of My Eyes series comprises 55 photographic portraits inscribed with ink. The artist conceived of the series as “a portrait of a county that for so long has been a crossroads of many different ethnicities, religions, and languages.” Only separated from Iran in the first half of the 19th century, Azerbaijan, especially resonated with Neshat, as it shares much of the same history, religion, ethnicity, and culture with her native country.
In this series, Neshat captures the individual character of her subjects in frontal, close-up portraits. While subjects range in age and ethnicity, Neshat unites them formally by staging them in similar clothing and poses, agains a dark background. Their specific hand gestures reference Christian religious paintings, most notably those of El Greco. The series additionally explores the subject’s individual voices. During production, Neshat spoke with them about their perspectives on cultural identity and the concept of home. Neshat then composed texts, which are calligraphic ally inscribed across the portraits, from both the sitters’ responses to the notion of homeland and from poems by Nizami Ganjavi, a 12th-century Iranian poet who lived in what is present-day Azerbaijan.
Ilgara, from The Home of My Eyes series, 2015.
Portraying the diverse people of Azerbaijan, Shirin Neshat’s The Home of My Eyes series comprises 55 photographic portraits inscribed with ink. The artist conceived of the series as “a portrait of a county that for so long has been a crossroads of many different ethnicities, religions, and languages.” Only separated from Iran in the first half of the 19th century, Azerbaijan, especially resonated with Neshat, as it shares much of the same history, religion, ethnicity, and culture with her native country.
In this series, Neshat captures the individual character of her subjects in frontal, close-up portraits. While subjects range in age and ethnicity, Neshat unites them formally by staging them in similar clothing and poses, agains a dark background. Their specific hand gestures reference Christian religious paintings, most notably those of El Greco. The series additionally explores the subject’s individual voices. During production, Neshat spoke with them about their perspectives on cultural identity and the concept of home. Neshat then composed texts, which are calligraphic ally inscribed across the portraits, from both the sitters’ responses to the notion of homeland and from poems by Nizami Ganjavi, a 12th-century Iranian poet who lived in what is present-day Azerbaijan.