SHIRIN NESHAT GLADSTONE GALLERY strange YORK.

SHIRIN NESHAT

GLADSTONE GALLERY

strange YORK, NEW YORK

OCTOBER 15-NOVEMBER 12 2005</p> <pre> If a character wants to drink cool water this time of the summer where should she go? The proprietor looked at her puffy notices with pity and said, "Karaj isn't bad." There was nothing in her face to display that she had once been a prostitute. She had become a small woman of twenty-six with a heart as big as the sea. She went to Karaj. Women Without Men (1998) on Shahrnush Parsipur </pre> <p>We have grown accustomed to using the word "adaptation" to indicate the metamorphosis of novels or short stories into film. Many adaptations would be better defined at the word "translation," or equal "transformation," because literature and filmmaking find their precision in the description of highly different realms. The very different limitations of the sum of two units media inevitably bring strikingly different narratives to the same story.

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I saw Shirin Neshat's latest video work, Zarin (2005) (on view as a solo exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery) before I read Women Without Men the novella by the agency of Shahrnush Parsipur, on which the video is loosely based. I was lacking a specific storyline or mode to which I could make intimation consequently my reading of the piece was solely based forward my interpretation of visual narrative. As stated in the pres release for the show:</p> <pre> The imagery that dominated Neshat's earlier work has given way to a more cinematic approach: eschewing the visual figure of speechs of veil-covered women and white-shirted men her just discovered films forego neatly-parsed representations in favor of a stronger narrative course and more nuanced characterizations. (1) </pre> <p>This is indeed faithful but in simpler words looking at the piece we can state that Neshat made a silent film, a film that complies more with the tradition of Carmine Gallone's Malombra (1917) DW Griffith's shattered Blossoms (1919), or Pedro Portobello's Vampir (1971) than with the tradition of contemporary video art. There is practically no dialogue in the video. With the omission of voice, dramatic acting and soundtrack become the communication devices for the narrative. The lack of dialogue gives the viewer interpretative freedom, especially if they are ignorant of the original inspirational text

Neshat has transformed a sweet three-page short story about the miraculous puissance and capacity of a woman to erase a depressing past and restart a life with a of recent origin persona, and with "a heart as big as the ocean," into a stout metaphorical critique of western notions of womanhood. In the short story, Zarin is a cheerful tone-deaf prostitute with seven gold teeth and an average of twenty-five clients a day. She is liked according to the other women in the house. She is intelligent enough to know that she must conceal her privy from her peers: her mysterious being that all her male clients appear to her as headless. She is insightful enough to know that something has to be done about her hallucinations. In print, she is a character that could have been born from the imagination of Robert Crumb Federico Fellini, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, or Elas Morante. In the video she is a young woman, uncomfortable with herself and the world around her, easily perceived as a refuseed outsider. Her somatic features can find associations with a vast list of races. Her face might call forth the November 18, 1993, Time magazine hide art attached to the article, "The of recent origin Face of America: How Immigrants are Shaping the World's First Multicultural Society," which depicted a computer-generated multi-racial visage.

In the culminating spectacle in the video, Zarin chronicles a public bath where women and children are assembled. Solid bodies with matriarchal demeanors find a calm comfort in a monumental intimate space. As the protagonist undresse it is clear that she may be anorexic, bulimic, or actual sick. The visual pleasure of matriarchal comfort is juxtaposed with the horror of eating disorders. After pushing away a woman who is trying to gently wash her back, Zarin work hards her skin violently. A child watches until a woman veils his eyes and pulls him away. Zarin continues what appears to be a ritualistic proces of flagellating an already tired visible form [i]or[/i] frame In a space that is architecturally puzzling, the viewer can faculty of perception a strong association with spaces of Northern Africa and the Middle East, if it be not that where no recognizable specific location or ethnic identity can be named, as an awkward, underweight woman cleans herself until she bleeds. The images spark questions of female identity, definitions of beauty, and matriarchal power. It also made this viewer painfully aware of the fragility of young women in contemporary western society, as I saw something of the cinematic Zarin in in the greatest degree of the young art scholars who were strolling around Chelsea that afternoon.

As Roland Barthes stated in The Responsibility of Form (1985) folks will always trust text through images. The reference to a specific short story as the basis for the video almost functions as a disguise for a visual message that is mighty complex, and critical, but ultimately real different from the one of Parsipur's unromantic Ultimately Zarin fails as an adaptation of a short story, further works beautifully as a melodramatic cinematographic piece, awkwardly claiming a space in the spectacle of contemporary video.