9/11: Shirin Neshat's Tooba

My favorite work about 9/11 is Shirin Neshat's film installation Tooba. I first saw it when Neshat gave the piece its American debut at a lecture at the American Federation of Arts in 2003. I remember leaving the event with my date and feeling obliterated by what we'd seen. I wrote about the piece on MAN about a year later (more on that later today), and then in 2005 I wrote a long feature about Neshat for the Los Angeles Times. These excerpts come from our conversation for that piece, which took place in NYC early in the summer of 2005.

Green: Where were you when it happened?

Neshat: I was right by the World Trade Center. My son was in school right near there, a couple of blocks away. I was on my way to do some editing [on a piece] and I looked in that direction. I looked up and someone said a plane had an accident. Not long after that I saw people jumping out of windows.

Green: In the days and weeks that followed, how did the attack affect you? [Ed. Here it's worth pointing out that in 1996 Neshat made her last visit to Iran. When she was leaving the country she was detained at the airport by state forces. She wasn't exactly arrested, but, as Neshat says, she was held "just enough so that the message was that I shouldn't re-enter." For the next five years she longed to return. She says that she had a "grand vision" of going home and making art.]

Neshat: I became even more vulnerable. I was worrying about my son, worrying about the future, worrying about where to live. I wondered if it got to the point where we were not so welcome here. Philosophically I felt this new fear over my head. I thought about leaving, but I didn't know where we'd go.

Green: So you said that you, like everyone else, fled north, north of SoHo where you lived. When did you get back?

Neshat: What was really traumatic the next day was the thing about looking Middle Eastern. Police had barricaded the whole area south of Houston and we had to pass every time and show IDs. I was surrounded by Iranian people and I was scared.

Green: And so at some point you decided to make art about 9/11.

Neshat: I had been thinking about what I wanted to do for Documenta. But the truth is, prior to that I had thought a lot about going to Iran and going to my father's ex-farm. [Ed: Neshat's family owned a large farm of mostly fruit trees outside of Qazvin. It was taken away from them by the government after the Islamic Revolution.] I had really romanticized about a big project, about how Documenta could be about my reunion with Iran. It had to do with my father's farm.

I thought it would be beautiful that I could make my first work going to back to Iran, that I could go back to this farm and this would really symbolize the conflict between the government and my father. The farm is literally dying because they wouldn't let him water, and they wouldn't let him care for it. So for me this garden this farm became the omen that was for me very metaphoric. So I called my brother and he was trying to work my visa out to come. And then 9/11 happened and I just said I don't want to come to Iran. I said, 'Forget this romantic idea.' I'm never going back there.

Green: So the garden in Tooba...

Neshat: I stayed with the garden, not the farm.

Green: I wrote about this on MAN a while back, about how Tooba was about 9/11, but I haven't read about that view of it anywhere else. Was I close?

Neshat: It was very much about 9/11. What's interesting is that 90 percent of people missed the whole point about how it was connected to that. It had everything to do with that. Very much consciously. Obviously it was bit of a reminiscence about what I'd been thinking about Iran, but it really took form after 9/11 as a film installation about paradise, about sanctuary and the need for security, and that tree being the epitome of a savior or a paradox. It is about you and me and about how everyone in the crowd desperately wanted to be safe, all of us running looking for some kind of sanctuary.