Shoja Azari and Shirin Neshat for the first time together in an exhibition. Iranian, but resident in New York they have worked together for some time now. In this exhibition they glance at the reality in which we live, even the more dramatic one and merge, in works of great emotional intensity, different traditions and numerous languages. The strong link with the literature from their country of origin, the music and the poetry is an integral part of their video which never as much as before as now have revealed themselves to be so actual. In Shirin Neshat’s Munis (one of the four stories of the film Women Without Men presented at the Cinema Festival in Venice), politics comes into the scene. The protagonist is revealed as a heroine and a woman capable of dying for freedom and love. An extremely poetical video which speaks of the idealistic confrontations and the difficulty of expression, lack of freedom, in which a man abandons a woman, whilst she continues to follow him even beyond life. Shoja Azari’s Odissey is the journey of a man towards his destruction. Filmed in an out of use slaughterhouse in Casablanca, in Morocco, it tells through long sequenced steps of how mankind is destroying itself. Essential, silent images, from fire light, chilly or gloomy in the desolated rooms of this torture place accompany Shoja’s metaphoric journey in mankind’s destiny.
