Textual/Textural Translations: Recitation and Resistance in Shirin Neshat's Photographs

In the early photographs of Shirin Neshat, a woman’s transcription of the words of women challenged the dominant discourses inscribed onto female bodies, recalling the processes of “écriture feminine” by Hèléne Cixous. In this session, I would like to explore not only the translatory significance of Neshat’s appropriated texts but their surface effects, drawing viewers into an interpretive exchange with the image that underscore writing as a performative, resistant act.

Writing is a projection of action, and the body bears the burden of textual meanings. Luce Irigaray, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Gloria Anzaldúa have addressed the act of writing as a resistance to dominant forms of language inextricable from corporeal experience. Neshat’s photographs resist patriarchal language not only in the adoption of women’s words, but in the ways their inscription onto bodies recode the readings women have been forced to bear. Her handwriting functions as a recitation, symbolically replaces Qur’anic verse and inferring the bodies as sacred and cultural sites. With the body serving as the poem’s page, the re-photographed images fused Neshat’s writing with the emulsion, sealing the portraits with the texts. In her self-portraits particularly, Neshat is both the surface upon which the text lies and the absent body that writes it, implicating her writing as equally performative to posing in chador. In this session, I will analyze Neshat’s selected writers and their translations as well as the conceptual and compositional strategies revealed in Neshat’s photographs throughout her career, including her most recent series, Fury (2023).