23 Quotes by Shirin Neshat

The first years of my life in the U.S. were very difficult.

Those of us living in the state of in between have certain advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of being exposed to a new culture and in my case the freedom that comes with living in the USA. The disadvantages of course being that you will never experience again being a center or quite home anywhere...

Art is no crime. It's every artist's responsibility to make art that is meaningful

Poets use metaphors and symbolism to construct images. I construct my images in the same way, except that I am using a different form.

In this Western world that we have, culture risks being [only] a form of entertainment.

Beautiful woman wrapped in chadors, with huge machine guns in their hands. Brilliant, shocking, amazingly contradictory images. They compelled me to deeply investigate these ideas.

Every Iranian artist, in one form or another, is political. Politics have defined our lives.

I find that through the study of women, you get to the heart - the truth - of the culture.

Part of me has always resisted the Western clichéd image of Muslim women, depicting them as nothing more than silent victims. My art, without denying repression, is a testimony to unspoken female power and the continuing protest in Islamic culture.