By GRAHAM REID
The blank screens fill with powerful, dichotomous images. On the left is the mysterious Old World of sandy-coloured Middle Eastern architecture, of holy silences and children playing by an old well within the walls of an ancient city.
On the other is the Modern World of hard-edged buildings, fume-spewing traffic and noise. The same woman walks through both.
This is Soliloquy, a striking video by the Iranian-born photographer and film-maker Shirin Neshat, who left her homeland in 1974 to work in the US and now, after a terrifying interrogation on a trip home six years ago, has reluctantly accepted the description "artist in exile".
Her homeland - once dominated by the Shah and politically oriented toward the West - is now an Islamist state which went through the revolutionary overthrow of the old regime five years after she left.
Today, women wear the burqa and Islamic fundamentalists hold sway. She loves the land but finds it problematic now, having lived in New York and been part of a progressive, intellectual community of artists such as Philip Glass, who composed the music for her moving, ritualistic meditation on death, Passage.
She is the woman in Soliloquy, an inhabitant of parallel worlds.
Neshat's early-90s photographic exhibition, Women of Allah, made her reputation. It captured seductively hypnotic if unsettling and internally contrasted images: veiled, often beautiful, women holding guns.
Her explorations of her relationship with Iran and Islam then moved into videos in a series of extraordinary films which, without dialogue and through unforgettable images, attracted international attention.
Three of these - unfortunately not Last Word, in which a woman takes flight from a menacing interrogation room of men - make up the exhibition of her work at the Auckland Art Gallery.
Now in her late-40s, Neshat has moved on yet again. She is adapting into a feature-length film Sharnush Parsipur's complex and metaphoric novel Women Without Men. She has already finished one segment - which appears as Tooba in the Auckland exhibition, a swarm of men in black moving across an arid landscape to a woman standing by the Tree of Knowledge - and regrets that pressure from her producers means she can't make it to New Zealand for her showing.
"They have given me a deadline of August and if I don't make it then ... " she laughs.
From her New York apartment Neshat tells how she has restlessly shifted from one medium to another ("It doesn't mean I don't go back to them, but I don't feel particularly faithful to any of them") and how the political climate in the West since September 11 has changed the context in which she works and is perceived.
Four years ago, Time asked her why the West was so fascinated by Islam - not a question which would be put in the same way today, perhaps - and now she has greater interest in her work as one who is seen as a voice from within that culture.
"In a lot of ways what we fear we also fantasise, and for me the Islamic ideology as a religion and a force has been the replacement for communism for a lot of Westerners.
"Islam has become the next biggest threat to the West because it has such a strong sense of ideology, and the notion of religion and faith having such importance in people's lives. I think all of that complexity puzzles people in the West, where people think the whole world is the same.
"Suddenly you are faced with a culture which is not operating on the same level and believes in very different things. What I see is this notion of fear.
"My work reiterates the sense of violence and the political reality of Islam, and the good aspects of Islam, such as the tradition and the beauty of the culture.
"The West packages the way people think about Islam, whereas I don't leave it this way or that way but consistently insist on the two - good and bad - together.
"The attention I have had is both positive and negative, and sometimes people's interest is superficial and they expect to read something very simplistic."
Neshat's work is often densely metaphorical and refers to Islamic stories and traditions, but with Tooba - filmed in Mexico and with no overt Iranian cultural references - she is expanding her parameters, making it harder for audiences to conveniently categorise her work.
"Now all the [Islamic] obviousness is away they have to really think about what the work means. When I worked with Mexicans to make Tooba and had Indian faces with no veil, while the subject was very Islamic and Iranian, it had a different flavour. They like to say I do the kind of work which puts men versus women and suddenly all of that is gone and I'm not doing that.
"The metaphors I use in my work are universal, the notion of gardens and the Tree of Paradise. Now I don't go back to Iran as much, obviously my work has changed."
Her interrogation - which she depicts in Last Word with poetry by Forough Farokhzad - was an experience typical of what many overseas Iranian artists go through when they return home (author Parsipur spent five years in prison), and much of Neshat's work has a sense of menace. She uses black figures in landscapes and is drawn to black for its power and her own cultural reasons.
"When I was doing the black and white [photography] work I didn't feel my subject was very colourful. And ever since the revolution, Iran seemed a black and white society. To me, colour is only there for a purpose, I cannot use it at random.
"Aesthetically, I'm interested in this relationship between people in black, and what that represents in the context of a place of a colourful nature. This is more than an aesthetic decision. For example, in Passage the landscape is evolving from the sea and the desert and the canyons but what remains constant is the people.
"So I needed this relationship between some things that change and some that don't and how they interact. It's a bit like a dance really and I thought about choreography in that respect.
"Tooba was pretty much the same thing. I was fascinated by the idea of people coming from different directions to the tree through the landscape and there was something dramatic and powerful about this relationship, almost haunting and frightening. Black is morbid and not a happy colour. I use it in that way always.
"The veil we wear is black, and the women from Iran, myself included, always wear black. We're very dark and melodramatic people," she laughs.
"It's also just in my nature that I am dark and I see that a lot of my figures are always wearing dark clothes. But I'm trying to change!"
* My Heart is East and West, three films at the Auckland City Art Gallery, August 28-November 7
Full interview
Artist in exile lifts the veil
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