The body as an art object in a series of photographs by Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat is wellknown as an IranianAmerican author of photographs, video installations and feature films. The artist all the time chooses an experiment and overcomes the narrow limits of individual genres of visual arts. The hybridity of Neshat’s art lies in the constant search for elements that unite different audiovisual media in the spacetime continuum between West and East. The artist simultaneously works with documentary authenticity and allegoricalness. The main cases that the author deals with in her creation are the women’s right, gender segregation, the nature of the birth of violence, the historical interaction between tradition and modernization. The key to decoding her work is the interpretation of the corporeality. The article deals with the female body as an art object in the context of Iranian political history and cultural tradition in the first and fundamentally important Neshat’s Women of Allah Series (1993-1997), which brought the artist world success and determined the style and content of her further works.