This article primarily centers on Shirin Neshat’s latest videographic installations titled “Land of Dreams,” while also briefly discussing her feature films and intermodal photo-poetic exhibitions.

Her oeuvre came to the spotlight with “Women of Allah” in which Shirin Neshat’s lens is questioning her own responsibilities with regards to the war efforts. What are the legacies of Muslim women at war? What drives women to kill or be killed? She interrogates feminist poetry of Simin Behbahani, Forough Farrokhzad as well as others to understand her own subjective position in this mayhem of guns and veils. Presented in simplified, yet amplified grammar of black and white images with calligraphed inscriptions, the collection brought her international attention.

over the years, her critical lens grows wider, encompassing questions of humanity’s shared dreams and nightmares. In her Land of Dreams, she questions the American Dream by taking point blank photographic shots at disenfranchised Americans living along the Mexican border. She then scetches their dream content in the backgrounds. The collection is an attempt at understanding how dreams bind humanity’s collective psyche. So there is a movement from the intimately personal outward that I will read in her latest exhibition, building on what she has produced so far.