Morning rituals… This striking image is a still from Soliloquy, a 1999 video installation by Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, whose powerful output explores themes of gender, identity and politics through film and photography. For this piece, two screens situated opposite one another showed the same veiled woman (the artist) “taking parallel journeys in two different cultural landscapes”, in the words of Tate. One is a western metropolis, the other a Middle Eastern city surrounded by desert—the setting of this symbolic scene. Neshat, who left Iran aged seventeen to study in the United States, based the work on her own experience of living between two cultures, and the simultaneous sense of freedom and displacement this resulted in.
