Join us at the Violet Crown Cinema for an opening weekend screening of Land of Dreams, the feature length film by exhibiting artist Shirin Neshat. Neshat will introduce the film and host a Q&A with co-director Shoja Azari afterwards.

About the Presenters

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat (b. 1957 Qazvin, Iran) is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Her photographs and video installations are highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives which question issues of power, religion, race, gender, and relationships between past and present, occident and orient, individual and collective through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian living in exile. Neshat’s early photographic works include the Women of Allah series (1993–1997), which explored the question of gender in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy. Her subsequent video works departed from overtly political content or critique in favor of more poetic imagery and complex human narratives. Neshat continues to explore and experiment with the mediums of photography, video, and film. Her most recent bodies of work include the photographic series Land of Dreams (2019), The Home of My Eyes (2015) and the trilogy Dreamers comprised of three video installations: Illusions and Mirrors (2013), Roja and Sarah (2016).

Neshat has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017,) and most recently Land of Dreams which premiered at the Venice Film Festival (2021.)

Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2022); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2021); The Broad, Los Angeles (2020); Museo Correr, Venice, Italy (2017); Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (2015); Detroit Institute of Arts (2013); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2006); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2005); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2000); and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal(2001).

Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006). In 2017, she received the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award in Tokyo

Neshat directed her first opera Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg Festival In 2017, which will be restaged in 2022.

She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in London.

Shoja Azari

Shoja Azari is an Iranian born filmmaker and visual artist who lives and works in New York. Azari’s feature films K, Windows, Women Without Men, and Simple Little Lives have been screened widely at film festivals around the world. Women Without Men, co-directed with the renowned filmmaker and visual artist Shirin Neshat, brought the directors the highly prestigious award of the Silver Lion (for “Best Director”) at the 2009 Venice International Film Festival. Shoja Azari and Shirin Neshat’s feature film collaboration includes Looking For Oum Kulthum, which was released in 2017 and most recently Land of Dreams, released at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. Azari’s art works are in major collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angles, and The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in Spain, amongst others.