Past Exhibitions

Shirin Neshat: Tooba January 14, 2006–July 1, 2007 SAAM Tateuchi Galleries

Tooba, a major video installation by internationally acclaimed, Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat, and a new acquisition, will be presented at SAAM. Since the early 1990s Shirin Neshat has explored themes of women and Islam, east and west, individual and collective, in monumental, double-screened projected video installations. Inspired by the novel "Women without Men" by Iranian writer Shahrnoush Parsipour, Tooba, or tree of paradise, centers around an image of the feminine tree, a symbol which originates in the Koran. Filmed in color near Oaxaca, Mexico, Neshat’s poetic allegory employs a style of magic realism and spare elegance, presenting a narrative of tension and transcendence. Tooba was commissioned by Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany. The first of Neshat’s works to be exhibited in Iran, it was presented in an exhibition in Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Shirin Neshat, Tooba, 2002, production still, © Shirin Neshat 2002, Photo: Larry Barns, Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.