Women In Black

Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery

One mic: A man recites the words of an Islamic mystic in Shirin Neshat's "Turbulent"

Related Content

• Kiarostami in Exile
  March 13, 2013
• Philip Glass at the Dakota, 4/6/11
  April 7, 2011
• Philip Glass
  April 6, 2011
• The 802 Tour's luxurious experience hits the Walker in March
  January 31, 2012
• The 802 Tour
  March 21, 2012

More About

• Shirin Neshat
• Sussan Deyhim
• Philip Glass
• Atom Egoyan
• Abbas Kiarostami

Neshat's latest film, 2001's "Passage," initially seems like a departure from earlier psychological allegories like "Rapture." Shot in color, with Philip Glass standing in for her usual musical collaborator (New York-based singer/composer Sussan Deyhim), the film opens with the camera gliding low over a vast plain of cracked rock gilded pale pink by the desert sunrise. While a funeral procession approaches bearing a shrouded bier, a huddled group of veiled women claw a grave out of the dust. The tableau, inspired by images of violence and mourning in Palestine, is both thrilling and apocalyptic.

Then, with one awesome stroke across the scarred land, Neshat turns the film into something far greater than political art; "Passage" becomes a ritual of purification. It provokes the same shiver as "Turbulent." Here at the edge of the grave, she suggests, is where the new world will begin.