Shirin Neshat: Compare And Contrast Analysis

Short essay

Wangechi Mutu and Shirin Neshat, are two powerful female artists with strong motives and messages behind their artworks. Even though these two women share the same message, they have very divergent styles of converting their message into art. Shirin Neshat’s powerful photographs and video installations illuminate the gender and cultural conflicts of her native Iran, she published a series of artworks called Women of Allah that overall broke every stereotype based on women, the artwork “Rebellious Silence”, a woman is pictured in a religious lookin like appareil, the artwork portraits the woman holding a rifle, but since the rifle is positioned vertically it gives off a relaxed vibe even though it should be representing something like stress or chaos/havoc. The portrait is
in black and white and the woman has some kind of inscription in her hace. On the other hand, Wangechi Mutu joins these disparate body parts with hand-drawn passages and pooled ink washes on nonabsorbent Mylar. The resulting figures suggest hybrids of human and machine, disease and power, seduction and violence, she has a very different technique of representing women in her artworks, for starters she used a less organized composition called collage instead of a basic drawing, the woman pictured in the collage “Preying mantra” seems a little distorted and she has an abstract looking complexion.
The overall view of this artwork gives off a very feminine vibe due to the vibrant warm pink tones of the background and the various amounts of plants surrounding the woman pictured, normally the pink pigments and plants are a symbol of nature, and women are associated with nature in a “mother earth” sort of way, these traits make the artwork give a very female look as soon as you see it. Comparing the two artworks , The “praying mantra” falls into the more generic standard gender role associated with women as said due to the colors and the various plants that stand around the female, also the female is sitting in a very distinctive feminine posture, basically everything about this artwork screams female and everything having to do with the female characteristics. On the other hand “ Rebellious Silence”,
breaks that sense of delicate women, at first glance you see a woman in a nun apparel which normally would be very normal, but when you take a closer look its actually traditional muslim religious wear, then a rifle is clearly visible splitting the woman in half, this woman to most people would appear as maybe a terrorist, but to me, she appears strong, the woman is breaking that stereotype of women being fragile and being lost without men, but that woman to me doesnt look like a terrorist, not at all, to me she looks like a strong woman with strong motives facing a sexist society. Now looking at both artworks clearly the Praying mantra would seem more “Lady like” but to me , the most powerful drawing that channels that feminist idea is clearly Rebellious silence. I love how the title of this artwork completely ties with corresponding artwork because it kind of means like all of the anger is being contained inside the woman holding the riffle giving that idea that she is about to shoot, and actually another artwork from the same series shows the same woman holding the roffle, but now she is about to pull the trigger , like if the Rebellious silence has been broken by the sound of the gun firing.