| UPDATE Delayed Opening The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Presents Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again On View February 28 through May 16, 2021 Due to hazardous weather and road conditions in the North Texas region, the exhibition opening date is postponed from Friday, February 19, until Sunday, February 28. |
| The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again, a survey of the internationally acclaimed artist’s work. Organized by and originating at The Broad, Los Angeles, this unprecedented exhibition will be on view in Fort Worth from February 28 through May 16, 2021. Curated by Ed Schad, curator at The Broad, this exhibition surveys approximately 30 years of the multidisciplinary artist’s video works and photography, investigating Neshat’s passionate engagement with ancient and recent Iranian history, the experience of living in exile, and the human impact of political revolution. Taking its title from a poem by the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1934–1967), I Will Greet the Sun Again begins with Neshat’s most famous body of work, Women of Allah, 1993–97. The exhibition then features her early iconic video works such as Rapture, 1999, Turbulent, 1998, and Passage, 2001; monumental photography installations including The Book of Kings, 2012, and The Home of My Eyes, 2015; and Land of Dreams, 2019, a new, ambitious work encompassing a body of photographs and two recent videos. The exhibition journeys from works that address specific events in contemporary Iran, both before and after the Islamic Revolution, to works that increasingly use metaphor and ancient Persian history and literature to reflect on universal concerns of gender, political borders, and rootedness. Throughout her career, Neshat has constructed metaphoric worlds in which women and men assume cultural gestures and poses, often assembling and giving voice to real people who have lived through seismic events of recent history, including the Green Movement in Iran and the Arab Spring in Egypt. Neshat’s own seismic event was leaving Iran in 1975, when she was 17 years old, to study at the University of California at Berkeley. Due to the Islamic Revolution (1978–79) and the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88), Neshat had to continue to live outside of her home country, separated from family. Being dislocated or between cultures, politics, and worlds figures prominently throughout her work. “Shirin Neshat has lived her life and made her art in between two different cultures, Iranian and American, and this existence has given her a poetic and penetrating ability to understand the physical and psychological borders of our world today: borders of nation, of gender, of exile, and of spirit,” said exhibition curator Ed Schad. “Whether through studying contemporary events, the deep echoes of Persian history, or the mysterious nature of dreams, Neshat vibrantly examines these borders, especially as she breaks through them.” Andrea Karnes, senior curator at the Modern, said, “As a prominent woman artist with a particular vision that has to do with her own life experience of being torn from her homeland, Neshat’s narratives reach so many, and they do so in the most beautiful and poignant of ways. We have long been admirers of Neshat and her powerful work.” About this exhibition, Neshat said, “Andrea Karnes and I have been in conversation for several years about the possibility of bringing my work to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, one of the most exquisite museums in America, with an outstanding exhibition program and iconic architecture. Finally, a dream comes true, and one of the largest surveys of my career will travel to Texas, to a community that is largely unfamiliar with my art. Personally, the timing of this exhibition could not have been more relevant following an unforgettable year of racial, socio-political, and health crises. In essence, thematically every work I have made so far, from the earliest series of Women of Allah (1993–97), a body of work which questioned tyranny, violence, and political injustice in respect to my own birth country of Iran, to the latest multimedia project Land of Dreams (2019), exploring my experience as an immigrant in America, will offer an emotional, historical, and political journey of a nomadic artist who has spent much of her life in exile and who is perpetually conflicted in between Eastern and Western values and her Iranian and American identities.” Exhibition Catalogue The survey is accompanied by a full-color catalogue that includes essays by Ed Schad, curator at The Broad and curator of this exhibition; Farzaneh Milani, the poet Forugh Farrokhzad’s biographer and an authority on Iranian literature and feminism; Godfrey Cheshire, a prominent writer on Iranian cinema and contributor to the New York Times, Film Comment, and Criterion; and Layla S. Diba, curator and scholar of Qajar Iran and modern and contemporary art. The catalogue also features a conversation between Neshat and Glenn D. Lowry, an Islamic scholar and the David Rockefeller director of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again is organized by The Broad, Los Angeles, and curated by Ed Schad, Curator, The Broad. The presentation in Fort Worth is made possible in part by a grant from the Fort Worth Tourism Public Improvement District. For high-resolution images, please email kendal@themodern.org. LOCATION Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth 3200 Darnell Street Fort Worth, Texas 76107 Telephone 817.738.9215 Toll-Free 1.866.824.5566 www.themodern.org Museum Gallery Hours Tue-Sun 10 am-5 pm Fri 10 am-8 pm General Admission Prices (includes special exhibition) $16: General (age 18 and above) $12: Seniors (age 60+), Active/Retired Military Personnel and First Responders with ID $10: Students with ID Free: Under 18 years old The Museum offers half-price tickets on Sundays and free admission on Fridays. The Museum is closed Mondays and holidays, including New Year’s Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas. |
