Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in United States
Shirin Neshat: The House is Black

Iranian-American filmmaker Shirin Neshat presents a rare screening of Forough Farrokhzad’s landmark short film The House is Black (1962) together with her own video, The Last Word (2003). Proclaimed by director Mohsen Makhmalbaf as "the best Iranian film," The House is Black is credited with ushering in the New Wave in Iranian cinema. This unsparing portrait of human suffering weaves haunting narration together with lyrical fragments of Farrokhzad's poetry, the Qur'an, and the Old Testament.

Forough Farrokhzad has been an important inspiration to Neshat, perhaps most directly in The Last Word which depicts the interrogation of a female writer whose work has been deemed dangerous by a brutal bureaucratic establishment. A chilling testament to the power of art, The Last Word culminates with a searing recitation of Farrokhzad's poetry.

Neshat will be joined in conversation by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Founding Director of the Center for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, and poetry editor of Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature (2006).

Born in Iran in 1957, Shirin Neshat emigrated to the United States at age 17 to attend the University of California at Berkeley. In 1986, she returned to Iran for the first of several visits and found the country transformed by the Islamic Revolution. Her resulting sense of displacement and exile inspired her to create works that investigate the collision of tradition and modernity in the East and West within an increasingly globalized world. According to Neshat, she engages in "universal dialogues while keeping within the specificity of the Islamic culture."

Shirin Neshat lives and works in New York.