SITE Santa Fe is pleased to announce the New Mexico premiere of Land of Dreams, a solo exhibition by Iranian-American artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.
Created in New Mexico in 2019, Land of Dreams is a multidisciplinary series featuring over one hundred photographs of New Mexico residents embellished with Farsi calligraphy and small-scale illustrations; a two-channel video following a fictional Iranian photographer as she travels door-to-door soliciting portraits of strangers while collecting their dreams; and a feature length film starring actors such as Sheila Vand, Matt Dillon and Isabella Rosallini. Alongside Land of Dreams is Neshat’s Dreamer’s Trilogy (2013-2016), three short films that draw inspiration from the artist’s own recurring dreams. Together, these works reflect one another, mirroring layers of ambiguity between dreams and reality, fiction and memory.
Complementing the exhibition is The Making of Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams, a documentary by Sophie Chahinian, and a screening of Neshat’s feature length film, Land of Dreams (2021).
About the Artist
Shirin Neshat (b. 1957 Qazvin, Iran) is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Her photographs and video installations are highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives which question issues of power, religion, race, gender, and relationships between past and present, occident and orient, individual and collective through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian living in exile. Neshat’s early photographic works include the Women of Allah series (1993–1997), which explored the question of gender in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy. Her subsequent video works departed from overtly political content or critique in favor of more poetic imagery and complex human narratives. Neshat continues to explore and experiment with the mediums of photography, video, and film. Her most recent bodies of work include the photographic series Land of Dreams (2019), The Home of My Eyes (2015) and the trilogy Dreamers comprised of three video installations: Illusions and Mirrors (2013), Roja and Sarah (2016).
Neshat has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017,) and most recently Land of Dreams which premiered at the Venice Film Festival (2021.)
Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2022); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2021); The Broad, Los Angeles (2020); Museo Correr, Venice, Italy (2017); Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (2015); Detroit Institute of Arts (2013); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2006); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2005); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2000); and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal(2001).
Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006). In 2017, she received the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award in Tokyo
Neshat directed her first opera Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg Festival In 2017, which will be restaged in 2022.
She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in London.
Accompanying Programs
During the course of the exhibition, SITE Santa Fe will offer a wide range of Public Programs including a film series curated by Shirin Neshat. Stay tuned for details.
