Shirin Neshat’s first solo exhibition in Cape Town brings together a video installation Sarah, a photographic still from Roja and Offerings, a series of recent photographic-based works, which through different means incorporate Neshat’s interest in the interior lives of women.

Sarah and Roja are part of a trilogy of video installations titled Dreamers, which explore the world of women’s dreams. In many ways, the characters and their dreamy narratives are projections of the artist in which she reflects on some of her own personal nightmares.

The single channel film Sarah is, according to Neshat, “about the unfolding journey of a woman as she recollects and breathes annihilation, as she faces residues of destruction, violence, genocide, and mortality in a state of dream. Sarah’s anxieties and fears at last force her to plunge into imagining her own death.” While not restricted to any particular time or place, the work is intended to reference a collective sense of anxiety and fear, part of the global experience in a world fraught with conflict. 

Neshat says: “In my opinion, rational interpretations of dreams never seem to properly capture their true meanings and significance within the human psyche. So Sarah is an effort to make sense of the more subliminal emotional and psychic universe that lives deep inside of us, but is difficult to explain through words.”

Dreamers is based on aspects of the artist's own dreams. Roja’s character and dilemma in many ways resembles hers: the fear of the ‘stranger’ and the ‘strange land,’ and desire for a reunion with ‘home’ with ‘mother,’ with the ‘motherland’ that seems welcoming at first but becomes terrifying and demonic in the end. Themes of ‘flight’ and ‘levitation’, implying freedom and ecstasy, is a significant aspect of the Roja series that is a recurring theme in Neshat’s work.