Shirin Neshat, Speechless

This piece is by Shirin Neshat and was created in 1996. This piece is titled Speechless. Shirin Neshat was born in Iran in the year 1957. She later moved to the United States for high school and studied art at the University of California. Neshat could not move back to Iran because of the Islamic Revolution that was occurring there; she was exiled for eleven years before she could come back . When she revisited her home country of Iran, it was completely different from what she remembered. The sense of not knowing where she belonged, Iran or US, this sense of displacement inspired a lot of her work, in which she contrasts many things such as Islam and the west, and man and woman. (Müller)
(Time Europe)

            This work of art relates to the theme of belittling women because this woman is being belittled by religion and by fear. While the Islamic religion has different roles for women, some interpret female roles to be more limited than male roles in different areas of life such as marriage, civil rights, and dress code(Wikipedia). There is Arabic writing all over the face of the woman and from behind her hood, which is part of the female dress code; the barrel of a gun is pointed outwards. The gun might be a threat that the woman might face if she speaks, or the gun is rendering her speechless as the title expresses.  This piece is from the collection titled “Women of Allah.” The pieces in this collection show women with calligraphic words on their bodies yet the titles of the individual pieces express a prohibition on speaking, such as Speechless.