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CHARTA
Shirin Neshat: Games of Desire
Text by France Morin, Catherine Choron-Baix, Shirin Neshat.
In November 2005, Shirin Neshat, recent winner of the Silver Lion award at the 2009 Venice Biennale, was invited to participate in an art project in Luang Prabang, Laos. While there, she attended a Buddhist ceremony at the Vat That Luang monastery, in which the life of Pha Vet, Buddha's penultimate reincarnation before enlightenment, is recited by the monks. One evening, on the monastery grounds, Neshat encountered a group of elderly laypeople, socializing and singing with passionate glee. Neshat learned that, during this recital, these men and women camped outside the sanctuary, listening to the reading and singing duets of the courting songs of their youth. Neshat, who has built much of her oeuvre on themes of ritual seduction through song and gesture, decided to make these Laotians the subject of her project, and returned in October 2008 to film the singers, costuming them in neutral colors to focus intensely on the singers themselves, and creating a projection in which male and female singers face each other in erotic tension.
FROM THE BOOK
"Yet what is most striking in the faces that appear on the screen is the mark that time has left on them and its so unexpected, so paradoxical character. On the features of these aging men and women, performers of songs of long ago devoted to the joys of youth, we read the reality of a tradition in decline. These jousts of oratory no longer attract the audiences of yesteryear. Facing stiff competition from the musical and film productions of radio and television, deserted by the younger generation which no longer understands their meaning, they hardly have an audience any more, or any specialist practitioners except among the very old. Shirin Neshat’s images make this truth stand out and convey a double message, at once erotic and political. By focusing on the faces of these men and women of a mature age as they speak to each other of love and break the rules of propriety with their jokes, they communicate a vitality and a sensuality that are still intact and a highly infectious and uplifting sense of humor. But at the same time they speak of a dying art and betray a conflict of memory. In a highly evocative manner, Games of Desire testifies to the tension between the past and the present in which contemporary Laotian society is caught, called on to make a sudden leap into modernity and globalization at the cost of forgetting its history and its traditions."
Catherine Choron-Baix, excerpted from Lao Voices, Shirin's Eye in Games of Desire.
FORMAT: Pbk, 8.25 x 9.5 in. / 72 pgs / 59 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $34.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $40 ISBN: 9788881587599 PUBLISHER: Charta AVAILABLE: 2/28/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not available
Published by Charta. Text by France Morin, Catherine Choron-Baix, Shirin Neshat.
In November 2005, Shirin Neshat, recent winner of the Silver Lion award at the 2009 Venice Biennale, was invited to participate in an art project in Luang Prabang, Laos. While there, she attended a Buddhist ceremony at the Vat That Luang monastery, in which the life of Pha Vet, Buddha's penultimate reincarnation before enlightenment, is recited by the monks. One evening, on the monastery grounds, Neshat encountered a group of elderly laypeople, socializing and singing with passionate glee. Neshat learned that, during this recital, these men and women camped outside the sanctuary, listening to the reading and singing duets of the courting songs of their youth. Neshat, who has built much of her oeuvre on themes of ritual seduction through song and gesture, decided to make these Laotians the subject of her project, and returned in October 2008 to film the singers, costuming them in neutral colors to focus intensely on the singers themselves, and creating a projection in which male and female singers face each other in erotic tension.
