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ReFocus: The International Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of Shirin Neshat

Edited by Maryam Ghorbankarimi and Mazyar Mahan

Format

£90.00

About this book

Offers the first comprehensive study of the internationally acclaimed Iranian visual artist and filmmaker whose work bridges cinema, photography and installation art

  • An interdisciplinary collection that brings together scholars from film, visual arts, gender studies and Middle Eastern studies to deepen understanding of Neshat’s contribution to contemporary visual culture and transnational cinema
  • Organised around three intersecting themes: Feminist Interventions and Cinematic Authorship, Diasporic Visions and Transnational Frames, and Sensory Histories and Poetic Bodies
  • Includes an extended interview with Neshat offering rare insight into her creative process and artistic evolution

Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this volume traces Neshat’s evolution from Women of Allah to her feature films Women Without Men, Looking for Oum Kulthum and Land of Dreams, situating her within global debates on feminism, exile and transnational aesthetics.

Organised around three themes: Feminist Interventions and Cinematic Authorship, Diasporic Visions and Transnational Frames, and Sensory Histories and Poetic Bodies, the collection presents diverse critical perspectives on her aesthetics of resistance and the politics of representation.

Featuring an exclusive interview with Neshat, the book offers new interdisciplinary insights into her artistic and cinematic legacy, positioning her as a pivotal figure whose work transforms personal narratives of displacement into universal meditations on power, memory and identity.

Reviews

This impressive edited volume bridges the national and transnational to liberate Shirin Neshat from the limiting label of the ‘exiled postcolonial artist.’ Investigating her work’s multidimensional explorations of identity, each essay remarkably centers feminist agency in Neshat’s visual poetics and illuminates how her art transforms the personal into the collective and the image into a site of resistance and healing.
Table of contents

1. An overview of Neshat’s films and career
Mazyar Mahan and Maryam Ghorbankarimi

2. An Interview with Shirin Neshat
Maryam Ghorbankarimi and Mazyar Mahan

Part I. Feminist Interventions and Cinematic Authorship

3. The Emphatic Address of Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari’s Feature Films
Valentina Vitali

4. Articulating the Feminist ‘I’: Shirin Neshat and the Politics of Authorship
Mazyar Mahan

5. On the Orientalist Stage: Re-signifying Space and Silence in Zarin (2006)
Farshad Zahedi

6. Unveiling the Everyday: Female Subjectivity and Subversive Agency in Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men (2009) and Mahdokht (2004)
Farzaneh Ebrahimzadeh Holasu

Part II. Diasporic Visions and Transnational Frames

7. Displaying Iran: Shirin Neshat in the Global Exhibition
Erin C. Devine

8. Looking Beyond Oum Kulthum: Transnational Imaginaries and the Iconoclastic Vision of Shirin Neshat
Michelle Langford

9. Between Two Worlds: Transnational Feminism and Aesthetic Resistance in The Fury
Maryam Ghorbankarimi

10. Embodied Narratives: Shirin Neshat’s Use of the Body as Textual Ground in Dialogue with Wafaa Bilal
Maryam Takalou

11. Migrant Dreams Build Nations; Shirin Neshat’s Reverent Gaze in Land of Dreams Endows Subjects with Human Rights
Mehraneh Ebrahimi

PART III. Sensory Histories and Poetic Bodies

12. Cinematherapy: Shirin Neshat’s Delineation of Body, Sexuality, and Neurobiology of Trauma in Women Without Men
Devaleena Das

13. A Study of Music Temporality in Shirin Neshat’s short films the phenomenology of ‘Ma’(間), and the in-betweenness of sound and music
Sascia Pellegrini

14. Between Dreamscapes and Realities in Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams (2021) and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006)
Maia Nichols

15. Toward Transnational Desert Landscape in Shirin Neshat’s Films
Ebrahim Barzegar

16. Reading Forough Farrokhzad through Fatimah al-Zahra: Self-Representation in Women of Allah (1993–1997)
Reynier Valdés Piñeiro

About the contributors

Maryam Ghorbankarimi

Maryam Ghorbankarimi is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on women’s representation in Iranian cinema, transnational feminist aesthetics, and the intersections of film, politics and cultural memory. She is the author of A Colourful Presence: The Evolution of Women’s Representation in Iranian Cinema (2015) and editor of ReFocus: The Works of Rakhshan Banietemad (2021). She also co-edited The I.B. Tauris Handbook of Iranian Cinema (2024).

Mazyar Mahan

Mazyar Mahan is a Teaching Associate and PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He teaches courses on transnational cinema, global art cinema, and understanding film. His dissertation examines films made by Iranian expatriate filmmakers over the past decade. His research has appeared in Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration, The Spectator, and The Palgrave Handbook of Arab Film and Media.

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