It Was in China, Late One Moonless Night

Abstract

Perhaps it should not be surprising that by far the most successful restoration of the erotic to the publicly camouflaged body, in the globally celebrated art of Shirin Neshat, should come from a constitutionally expatriate artist. By revealing the erotic visuality of the body, Shirin Neshat has restored its corporeal energy up against both its political metaphorization into the principal site of state violence and its contrapuntal aesthetic metamorphosis into a sight of resistance to that violence. In the absence of Hafez's astonishing poetic revelation, the private is discreet, the discreet secret, the secret sacred. Opposing this oligarchic tyranny of metaphors and restoring to the publicly unruly sensual evidence of life its anarchic energies, Shirin Neshat's stunning visual homage to Farid al-Din Attar's "Conference of the Birds" is rooted in a rich and ancient tradition of literary and poetic imagination that she now takes to unanticipated and counterintuitive, visual and performative directions.

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