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121
Shirin Neshat, Home of My Eyes, 2015

Chapter: Home of My Eyes - Home and Exile

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The meeting of different ethnicities and languages
Shirin Neshat’s black-and-white portraits in the series Home of My Eyes depict people of all ages from Azerbaijan with very different backgrounds and ethnic affiliations. The Iranian artist, photographer, and filmmaker, who resides in the United States, primarily addresses the situation of women in Iran, but also questions of identity, migration, and power structures. For The Home of My Eyes (2015), she focused for the first time on the population of Azerbaijan, turning her attention to another society in which diverse ethnicities, religions, and languages come together, many originating from places such as Iran, Armenia, Russia, or Turkey.

A mother’s cooking
For her fifty-five portraits, she asked all participants the same question: What does “home” mean to you? It was significant that many of them had a migrant background and that their culture was rooted in other countries. Most of those interviewed answered very simply and pragmatically, Neshat recalls. Often it was small things: the smell of their mother’s cooking, or the blossoms opening on the first day of spring in Baku.

A delicate seismographic fabric
The answers were first translated into English and then into Farsi. Neshat’s texts, written in calligraphy across the portraits, overlay every exposed area of skin on the face, arms, and hands. They extend across the photographs like a hair-thin, seismographic fabric, uniting the interviewees’ responses with poems by Nizami Ganjavi, a twelfth-century Iranian poet who lived in what is now Azerbaijan.

Portrait of a country
For Neshat, language is quite literally inscribed in people. As in her own biography, feelings of home are linked here to memories of uprooting, loss, and grief. At the same time, Neshat’s series forms a portrait of a country. For her, the subjects come together “into a mosaic of human faces that pays tribute to Azerbaijan’s rich cultural history and its diversity.”


Audio

Note: The audio transcription is voiced by an AI.

Shirin Neshat, Malaksima, 2015
From the series The Home of My Eyes, 2015
Silver gelatin print and ink on paper
© Shirin Neshat. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone
Written Art Collection

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