Precisely 30 years after the debut of her provocative photo-portraits, this book chronicles the early career of Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat. In its first 20 years, Neshat’s work weaved viewers into complex readings of women and power in Iran. Yet her images also drew criticisms of exoticizing Muslim women, and later video installations were accused of lacking political assertion during stormy relations between the West and the Islamic world. Now broadly recognized as a social justice artist, this volume chronicles Neshat’s evolution from photography to film, from personal to political expression, and expands existing scholarship to investigate underserved contexts for her work, including the cinematic turn and emergent theories of globality in contemporary art. Neshat’s hyphenated identity was often attenuated by reductive and exoticizing discourses; therefore, this volume draws attention to her transnational methodologies, informed by strategies of appropriation, performativity, and embodiment while articulating Persian visual and literary traditions. Complicating simplistic ethnographies, her disruption of neo-Orientalist paradigms and representations has led audiences to reconsider Islamophobic, Islamism, and gender repressions that are political, psychological, and above all cross-cultural. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, photography, cinema studies, performance, transnational and global studies, women’s studies, and Iranian studies.

The first scholarly monograph devoted exclusively to this vital work of contemporary public art, this book examines Maya Lin’s Confluence Project through the lens of environmental humanities and Indigenous studies. Matthew Reynolds provides a detailed analysis of each earthwork, along with a discussion of the proposed final project at Celilo Falls near The Dalles, Oregon. The book assesses the artist’s longtime engagement with the region of the Pacific Northwest and explores the Confluence Project within Lin’s larger oeuvre. Several consistent themes and experiences are common amongst all the sites. These include an emphasis on individual, multisensory encounters with the earthworks and their surrounding contexts; sound as an experiential dimension of landscape; indexical accounts of the multicultural, multispecies histories of each place; and an evocation of loss. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, environmental studies, environmental humanities, and Native American studies.

Seen and Unseen teases out and explores how visual mediums construct visual cultures that often create limited perspectives of certain issues and groups. This volume focuses in particular on the representation of Islam and Muslims. It deals with fixed and stereotypical visual representations and explores alternative and challenging visual representations that reconstruct and dismantle existing belief systems. It approaches the topic from a vantage point of diverse multiple perspectives. Covering issues from Brunei, Iran, Egypt, and England and cyberspace, the essays in this volume examine the visual cultures of how Islam and Muslims are understood, misunderstood, misrepresented, or even embraced visually. Scholars in this volume draw on historical paintings, books and their covers, photography, and news to demonstrate the diversity and sometimes contradictory visual cultures that construct and adhere meaning to how Islam and Muslim people are seen. Contributors: Hoda Afshar, Jared Ahmed, Syed Farid Alatas, Sanaz Fotouhi, Christiane Gruber, Layla Hendow, Raihana M.M., Bruno Starrs and Esmaeil Zeiny.

From the mid-20th century to present, the Brazilian art, literature, and music scene have been witness to a wealth of creative approaches involving sound. This is the backdrop for Making It Heard: A History of Brazilian Sound Art, a volume that offers an overview of local artists working with performance, experimental vinyl production, sound installation, sculpture, mail art, field recording, and sound mapping. It criticizes universal approaches to art and music historiography that fail to recognize local idiosyncrasies, and creates a local rationale and discourse. Through this approach, Chaves and Iazzetta enable students, researchers, and artists to discover and acknowledge work produced outside of a standard Anglo-European framework.

A wave of new scholarship floods her text....Chadwick opens up whole new ways of thinking about familiar images.--Women's Art Journal

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