“The Home of My Eyes” curated by Thomas Kellein at Museo Correr in Venice is the best collateral event of the 57th International Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. An opportunity to see 26 portraits from The Home of My Eyes series together with her new video Roja.
Commissioned by YARAT for the opening of YARAT’s newly built contemporary art center “the Home of My Eyes combines 55 portraits of men and women from different generations, to create a tapestry of human faces which pays tribute to the rich cultural history of Azerbaijan and its diversity”. It portrays people from Azerbaijan different for ethnicity, religion, age, culture, gender but similar in their clothes and hand gestures remembering the Christian prayer gestures. Photographs that don’t record only a woman or a man but that capture human emotions: “these are not only portraits but visual narratives of a culture.” In fact this series explores also the subjects’ individual voices: during the production Shirin Neshat spoke with them about their cultural identity and idea of home. So the texts inscribed across the portraits were composed by Shirin Neshat starting from the tales of the people she met and photographed and the poems by Nizami Ganjavi, a 12th century Iranian poet who lived in what is present-day Azerbaijan.
The project showed in Venice is focused on homeland. In the case of “The Home of My Eyes” the artist reflects about different experiences of homeland through the tales of the people photographed, instead in the video Roja, the artist reflects on some of her own personal nightmares, on her own experience of living in the foreign culture of the United States.
Shirin Neshat, Roja, 2016. Production Still. Copyright Shirin Neshat
Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels