Summary Of Shirin Neshat's Rebellious Silence

The art theorist W.J.T. Mitchell has argued that “Pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into a language (82).” Indeed, picture has an ability to make issues of the world become visible in a sort of photochemical language. In Shirin Neshat’s Rebellious Silence, which is one of the photographs of her Women of Allah series, she depicted a portrait of a typical Muslim woman who is veiled and armed. The woman is holding a rifle, and the long barrel bisects the portrait perpendicularly. Her face is covered with text which is in a shape of veil, and her eyes look determined and stare intensely towards the camera. Through this black-and-white image, the viewer can see a set of symbols it contains that represent the Muslim culture: veil, rifle, calligraphy and gaze, and all of them are able to convey ambivalent attitudes.
Denotative meanings: veil, rifle, calligraphy and gaze In the case of the veil and the text, both are typical symbols of Muslim culture. The veil, which is required to be worn by Muslim women in public, can be viewed as a religious sign of them.
Just as Sontag explains, photographs are "the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern (175)." This is indeed what Neshat made her work a metaphor of the Middle-East's society and thus led its conditions of tensions and contradictions become visible to the viewers. In addition, I believe that although photography is two - dimensional, it can be viewed through multidimensional lens, just as Kleege argues, “the same photograph will prompt a wide range of responses from different viewers (228).” Varies viewers are able to uncover the multiplicity of understandings of a single work, there is no a constant answer, and thus this is why the contradictions always