Baku, April 9 AZERTAC

Founded as part of YARAT‘s strong commitment to the younger generation of students and film-makers, YARAT Film Club (YFC) aims to become an informal meeting point for the viewing and discussion of contemporary art videos and films.

Group of students, emerging film-makers and art lovers will gather to watch and chat about the works and discuss informally in the presence of the artists and directors.

All screenings will take place in the multi-functional room at the new YARAT Centre.

The first videos to be screened at YFC on 11 April are Turbulent, Rapture, Fervor and Illusions & Mirrors by an artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography.

Since 2000, Neshat has also participated in film festivals, including the Telluride Film Festival (2000), Chicago International Film Festival (2001), San Francisco International Film Festival (2001), Locarno International Film Festival (2002), Tribeca Film Festival (2003), Sundance Film Festival (2003), and Cannes Film Festival (2008).

In 2010, Neshat was named ‘Artist of the Decade’ by Huffington Post critic G. Roger Denson.

In 2013, she was a member of the jury at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival.

Neshat's name reached a more international stage in 1999 when she won the International Award of the XLVIII Venice Biennale with Turbulent and Rapture, a project involving almost 250 extras and produced by the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont which met with critical and public success after its worldwide avant-première at the Art Institute of Chicago in May 1999. With Rapture, Neshat tried for the first time to create pure photography with the intent of creating an aesthetic, poetic, and emotional shock.

In Turbulent, Neshat’s 1998 two-screen video installation, two singers (Shoja Azari playing the role of the male and Iranian vocalist and composer Sussan Deyhim as the female) create a powerful musical metaphor for the complexity of gender roles and cultural power within the framework of ancient Persian music and poetry.

Rapture exists as a poignant reflection on the rootless, unsettled psychology of exile. As an Iranian expatriate living in the United States, Neshat maintains a critical distance that has allowed her to locate both the poetics and the power of the veil. While she celebrates the strength and beauty of Islamic women, she remains keenly aware of the horrors of repression.

Fervor is a two-channel black-and-white video/audio installation, courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Fervor focuses on the negative view of love within the Iranian culture after the Islamic revolution. The black-and-white medium was an instant reflection of the clear-cut contrast of men and women in the mosque, with women in black veils and the men in white shirts.

Illusions & Mirrors looks forward, perhaps with dread, to a future already lurking in shadowed, antique rooms - as Natalie Portman follows a man in black who appears on the shore, then hurries over the dunes to glide up stairs and through empty halls. She comes upon other, mysterious elements: a line of people on chairs along a wall, an older woman stroking the hair of “another” of herself. Movement is cautious and tense, the narrative wordless and insinuating. Views fade and double, alternating clear and sharp with other, wavering scenes, like memories or hallucinations, portents of what-will-be. Finally we see Portman from a darkened window as she observes herself outside in sun and wind, back on the shore at the beginning.