"Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions.”
–Edward Said, excerpt from Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 2000

Shirin Neshat’s Soliloquy (1999) explores self-identity and is shown with the viewer placed in between two screens that face each other. One screen reveals a veiled Neshat wandering through a Western cityscape, while the other shows her in similar clothing making her way through a traditional Eastern cityscape. The architecture highlights the differences between the two worlds. Through acceptance and rejection, the artist examines ideas of exile and home, of modern and traditional, and of the individual and the communal.

One advantage of Neshat’s “in between” state is her ability to critique the cultures of Iran and the United States from the perspectives of “outside looking in” and “inside looking out.” The results are two points of view that run parallel to each other: on the one hand Western, exile, and modern, and on the other Eastern, traditional, and home. Her unique vantage point allows us to place ourselves at a position of our own choosing, viewing Neshat’s work not from a place that she has defined, but from one we define for ourselves.

“I had been working on the subject of the female body in relation to politics in Islam and the way in which a woman’s body has been a type of battleground for various kinds of rhetoric and political ideology. Recently, through some reading, I became very interested in how space and special boundaries are also politicized and are designed to lift personal and individual desire from the public domain and contain it within private spaces. Ultimately, men dominate public spaces and women exist for the most part in private spaces … ”
–Shirin Neshat, 1997

Many of Neshat’s works relate to women’s rights in conflict with contemporary Islamic practice, which dictates strict rules for women’s behavior and mode of dress. But the artist cautions that feminist ideas from the United States may not apply to feminists in Iran. Equality between women and men is a goal often associated with U.S. feminism. Neshat, however, believes that Iranian feminists don’t desire equality with men. They accept and respect differences between men and women, and seek rights that serve women as equal partners with men, but with different roles in society.

In Iran, wearing a chador allows women to move outside the confinement of home into public and professional areas. As one Iranian schoolgirl explains: “We want to stop men from treating us like sex objects… . We want them to ignore our appearance and be attentive to our personalities and minds. We want them to take us seriously and treat us as equals, not just chase us around for our bodies and physical looks.”

Excerpt from Women in World History Curriculum 2002

Shirin Neshat has firsthand knowledge of the chador and its complex history, having grown up in an Iran that forbade the chador and now representing her homeland in her work. But the complicated symbols suggested by the chador are a small part of what Neshat is after. For her, it points to larger issues of women’s roles and cultural identity in a global world.

Soliloquy, the most autobiographical of Shirin Neshat’s works, examines self-identity. By placing the viewer between two screens that face each other, the artist shows how a person can feel divided between two worlds. One screen depicts a veiled Neshat roaming through an anonymous modern cityscape (filmed in Albany, New York). On the other, she is similarly dressed but traverses a traditional Eastern cityscape (Mardin, Turkey). She made this work shortly after the deaths of her father and cousin in Iran. It is marked by a sense of loss: mourning for family, for the pre-Revolutionary Iran of her childhood, and for her own sense of place, which she lost when her father sent her to study in the United States.

“I see my work as a visual discourse on the subjects of feminism and contemporary Islam–a discourse that puts certain myths and realities to the test, claiming that they are far more complex than most of us have imagined. It is very important to point out, however, that I don’t see myself as an expert on this subject. Rather, I consider myself a passionate inquirer. I prefer raising questions as opposed to answering them, as I am totally unable to do otherwise. And I am not interested in creating works that simply state my personal political point of view.”

Excerpts from an interview with Shirin Neshat by Gerald Matt published in an exhibition catalog, Shirin Neshat, Kunsthalle Wein, Wein, Germany and Serpentine Gallery, London, England, 2000.

“Soliloquy was not a biographical piece. It is based on my personal experience–this experience of course not being unique, as the globalization of the world and the rapid migration has uprooted many of us… . My family of course never completely understood the feeling of "dislocation” that I have experienced, since they were not with me. But after so many years of distance they have accepted that I will never completely come back. These are the types of subtle issues that I was hoping to bring up in Soliloquy: issues that are entirely based on emotions as opposed to facts.“

Excerpt from an interview with Shirin Neshat on the online forum of the Carnegie International: 1999-2000.