Shirin Neshat, Film Still from Land of Dreams, 2021; Signed and Numbered Limited Edition Print
Internationally renowned, Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat works with photography, video, and film to create complex human narratives that address the universal themes of gender, displacement, oppression, and identity.
This limited edition print captures a film still from Neshat’s latest video installation Land of Dreams (2019). The film follows an Iranian woman photographer traveling through rural America knocking on the doors of citizens from different economic and racial backgrounds to shoot their portraits and document their dreams and nightmares. By way of a highway, amidst a barren desert landscape, we enter the interiors of a bureaucratic Iranian colony tucked away inside of a mountain where these Americans' portraits and dreams are logged, analyzed, and interpreted.
Shot in a surrealist approach led by black and white visuals of vast landscapes and domestic scenes, Land of Dreams deepens Neshat's longstanding interest in the duality between the ephemeral nature of dreams and the tangibility of political issues, Eastern and Western cultures, in this case more specifically the long-standing tension between Iran and the United States. Neshat combines striking imagery with political satire, evoking a shared humanity among those living under social, political, and economic injustice.
Of this limited edition print created for ART FOR CHANGE, Neshat remarks, "The Center for Human Rights in Iran is one of the most effective organizations in America that is helping dissidents, refugees and political prisoners in Iran. I’ve worked closely with them in 2019 and am pleased to have the opportunity to continue to support them."
Signed and numbered by Shirin Neshat
ART FOR CHANGE will donate 20% of the net proceeds of each limited edition print sold to the Center for Human Rights in Iran. This limited series is part of AFC’s Changemakers collaboration with Pari Ehsan.