Shirin Neshat

Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art (2011-2012)

The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art is a high-profile initiative at the University of Oxford dedicated to promoting the study of contemporary art through its foremost practicing artists. Ambitious in its scope, the Visiting Professorships brings diverse artists of critical acclaim to the University Oxford, where the initiative is recognised as one of the University’s most important channels for engagement with contemporary art.

The initiative enjoys a special relationship with the Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries, often overlapping to provide a dynamic forum for exchange about arts and culture in modern society.

The Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art has been made possible by the generous support of Ivorypress and is hosted by Magdalene College, Oxford.

Shirin Neshat is is an Iranian visual artist who is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography.

Shirin Neshat opened her Humanitas series with a public lecture on Images and History in which she talked openly and honestly about the ways in which her own personal history in and out of Iran had affected the development of her work.

After showing her two-screen video installation Turbulent, she went on to discuss other film pieces including Rapture, Soliloquy and Women Without Men, and the photographic series Women of Allah and the Book of Kings.

In the final symposium Neshat discusses Portraiture: Past and Futures with a panel that includes: MalcolmRogers, Director of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; William Ewing, writer and curator of photography; and the writer, A.S. Byatt.