By the staircase there are some large black and white photos, images of protest. I notice one of them has pictures of the Shah, I presume wrongly, they are old documentary genuine photos. I arrive to see the first of two videos. The language is in Iranian, however luckily for me, the subtitles, which are not always forthcoming, are in English. It seems to me I am watching a man arguing with his wife, who is listening to a radio broadcast, the man is becoming more and more irate, the woman more pensive. The film transcends into this protest, which is vehemently anti-British, as it portraying the epoch they tried to re-instate the Shah. The film is shot in black and white.

The music for both films is ambient, with dark tones and I am impressed by it. Important to the first video is the image of a man and woman lying on the ground, their image shot from above. Poetic words accompany the images. The second video seems to me to be about a marriage that has gone terribly wrong. The film and music has a ghostlike quality. There are images of remote landscapes, a house left to decay. I think one of the delights of seeing short films such as these, is the deductions we have to make, to try to comprehend what we are watching and also the space that is left to use our own imagination, to fill in the gaps. A woman seems to be drifting around, a lost spirit, burdened by some terrible memory. She keeps referring to a dress she is going to wear to a wedding. Towards the end of the video we see her being pinned down by some men, maybe she was violated. The video has this hazy dreamlike quality. I realise having seen the videos, that the exhibition below are stills from the videos.

Shirin Neshat, born in Iran doesn't quite know where to call home, she is displaced. The 43-year-old artist moved to the U.S. after high school to study art. When the Islamic Revolution overtook her homeland in 1979, Neshat was exiled and couldn't return until 11 years later--and the country she went home to bore little resemblance to the one she left.

Neshat reflects her sense of displacement by trying to untangle the ideology of Islam through art . er large scale photographic images are beautifully produced and her videos have great qualities to them.

Francis H. Powell is originally from England and moved to Paris in 1999. In addition to being a writer (articles, songs and poems), he is a painter, DJ and English trainer. For more information, please click here to read his complete bio.

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