Artist Shirin Neshat on the women-led protests in Iran

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: Artist Shirin Neshat on the women-led protests in Iran

Lilah Raptopoulos
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[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Since protests began in Iran four weeks ago, the artist Shirin Neshat has been glued to her phone.

Shirin Neshat
I think for most of us living outside of Iran, we pretty much expected that we will go very likely the rest of our lives in the state that we are. Maybe things will go up and down a little in Iran, but we’ll never go back. And then came this day and this news, and we thought, oh, well, this is just another short uprising the last a few days or a week. And now it’s like we’re entering the fourth week, the longest uprising we’ve had since the Iranian revolution in 1979. And the people of Iran are furious.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Shirin lives in the US She has since the 1970s. But over the last 30 years, she’s become one of the most esteemed, well-known artists making work about Iranian women in the world. And women are leading the current protests. Mostly really young women. The protests began after the death of 22 year old Mahsa Amini. Mahsa had been detained by Iran’s morality police for allegedly not properly observing the hijab, and she died in their custody. But her death sparked action that’s grown far beyond a call for justice for Mahsa’s family and beyond fighting for the laws around women’s dress.

Shirin Neshat
It sort of unleashed a kind of rage that was brewing in people’s heart and lives. And it was almost as if they were having to wait for a martyr or someone who symbolised their struggles.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today, Shirin gives us context for the protests in Iran. We also talk about her expansive body of work. Shirin is a multimedia artist. She came to fame with a series in the nineties called Women of Allah. This month, in support of the protests, Shirin has allowed some of these images to be projected on buildings across central London and Los Angeles. Then we turn to drug research and speak to two FT journalists who have been covering an encouraging trend. It turns out that we can now grow entire mini organs in a lab and then test on them. That could mean cutting way down on animal testing while making more advances in medicine. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Since Mahsa’s death on September 16th, protests have been growing across Iran.

[AUDIO CLIP OF PEOPLE SHOUTING IN NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGE]

Lilah Raptopoulos
The situation has gotten violent. According to rights groups, 185 people, including 19 minors, have been killed as of this past Tuesday. But beyond the big demonstrations, protests seem to be happening everywhere, especially among young women.

[AUDIO CLIP OF PROTESTS PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
You may have seen videos on social media of high school girls giving photos of Iran’s supreme leader the middle finger . . . 

[AUDIO CLIP OF GIRLS SHOUTING IN NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGE]

Lilah Raptopoulos
 . . . or waving their headscarves in the air, chasing officials out of their school, shouting, ‘Shame on you.’ Acts of incredible bravery in a country that mandates what women wear and what they do. When I spoke to Shirin last weekend, I wanted to understand how the women of Iran had gotten here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Shirin, welcome. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Shirin Neshat
Thank you for having me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I would love to talk about the themes of your work in relation to the protests happening in Iran. But first, I wanted to ask you if you could walk us through what’s been happening there. We know the protests were kicked off by the death of a young woman named Mahsa Amini. But I’d love to hear how you would describe what has happened since.

Shirin Neshat
Yes. Ironically, as you and I speak right now, there is perhaps the biggest protest happening in the streets of Tehran today, Saturday, October eighth. And there’s a scenes of massacre going on in the streets. And my sister just left me a message from Iran that is total chaos on the streets of Tehran.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Really.

Shirin Neshat
Yeah. It doesn’t feel like just another kind of protest or a passing uprising, but it’s really starting to look like a revolution and I am shaking as I speak with you. The government is just going all the way in retaliation and the people are not giving up. So there’s a scene of war all over the country.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Shirin So much of your work is focused on women and women’s bodies, and this protest is against the mandatory hijab, maybe on the surface, but it seems to represent so much more. I’m wondering if you can tell us what people are fighting for.

Shirin Neshat
Yes. I mean, just talking specifically about what I have tried to do in my work. It’s been really to look at how historically only in the country of Iran, not all across the Islamic world, the female body has been such a contested space and each time there is a change of the governments, the whole situation for the woman changes completely. You know, it came in 1925 during Reza Shah. Reza Shah Pahlavi’s father, where his mandate was to move Iran away from a religious society, toward a more modern and progressive society. So therefore, it was illegal for a woman to step out in the public domain with the hijab. Ten years later, by the time the woman became very cosmopolitan and of course, some people remained religious. Then came the revolution in 1979 and came with Khomeini hijacking that revolution and soon after it was mandatory for the women to wear the veil. And that basically has become the image of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The identity as if the women unveiled, you know, their whole image as a government would fail and that’s why they would not possibly relax even somewhat the rules.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. How does that translate into your work?

Shirin Neshat
I mean, I’ve never really been after anything other than framing the questions because I’ve never been interested in criticising people who are religious or not religious, but simply saying this is an incredible phenomena, how a woman’s body is, you know, is in such dispute. And then you see today the woman of Iran is saying, enough, enough is enough. Keep your religion and ideology out of my body. And the men are supporting the women.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Are you surprised that these protest came from women, that they erupted around the sort of women’s autonomy or . . . 

Shirin Neshat
You know, we’ve had a lot of uprisings in the past 43 years, people really confronting the government for the economic reasons, unemployment, unfair election, lack of water. But it’s really amazing that the time that is focused on women, it’s not stopping. It’s like, yeah, always in my work I have said that the women of Iran, yes, they’re against the war and they’re truly oppressed, but they’re not losers. They’re defiant, they’re resilient, rebellious, they’re fighters. And so, no, I’m not surprised because as all I’ve been saying all this time [laughter], that women of Iran are fearless regardless of generation. Can I add that what’s really, really remarkable is the youngest woman in the age of teenager from 12 to 17 are the most intelligent, the most articulate. I get goosebumps when I talk about it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, it’s really interesting to hear you say that. You kind of weren’t expecting this to continue and also that you’re not surprised that it’s these young women. I guess what is it about the young protesters that feels different to you? Do they feel different?

Shirin Neshat
I think the level of anger and rage that is embedded inside of them, you know, imagine if you’re seven years old and you were told you have to wear the hijab. I mean, what kind of life is that? You’re just a child. Imagine when you are forced to be educated in a particular education that is purely Islamic. You know, imagine, you know, that you can’t even walk down the street with your friends freely. I mean, I just find that they’re being so violated for their basic rights. And, you know, it’s hard for you and I to imagine sitting in the West, you know, we don’t experience this much violence, this much oppression, day after day after day.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I should say here that Shirin was born and raised in Iran, but the Iranian revolution happened while she was studying in America. So she didn’t return for close to 20 years. After her first trip back in 1990, she started making art. Shirin was officially banned from Iran in 1996, so she’s an artist looking at her home from the outside in. And a lot of the themes in her work are about that: longing, reconciling her Iranian identity with Western expectations. But tons of Shirin’s work also addresses the politics of Iran directly. One piece I love that feels very relevant to this current movement is a video installation called Turbulent. It won the 1998 Venice Biennial prize.

[AUDIO CLIP OF PEOPLE SHOUTING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
The video starts with a very traditional male Iranian singer singing to a very appreciative, traditional male Iranian audience.

[AUDIO CLIP OF A MALE IRANIAN SINGING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
But halfway through it switches to an Iranian woman singing to an empty room.

[AUDIO CLIP OF A FEMALE IRANIAN SINGING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Iranian law forbids women from public performance. So this woman’s song naturally defies the rules. And then it starts to upend them. It becomes almost nonsensical.

[AUDIO CLIP TRANSITIONS TO A FEMALE IRANIAN SINGING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Until it builds to something unbearable. You can feel it in your bones.

[AUDIO CLIP OF GUTTURAL NOISE]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I watched it again and was just yesterday and was so moved by it. Maybe you can explain it.

Shirin Neshat
Yes. On the surface, it was really about how women ever since the Islamic Revolution were deprived of the experience of public performance music. They were never allowed. And the men are. But once it came to her turn, it was without any tie to language. It was a guttural. And when she started to sing, her music became an expression of rage and anger. And even through so many different emotions. It became a kind of a protest. And, you know, it was one of the work that, you know, I didn’t have to explain anything. The whole world understood that you’re you got, you know, the woman who is alienated anyone in the world who’s more pushed against the wall. There’s more chances that they are reacting more tougher.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, absolutely. And I see sort of there’s this pain of not being heard. You know, when you’re watching these protests and watching women showing their hair and teenagers standing up to the morality police. And there’s also this feeling to me of like, we have nothing to lose.

Shirin Neshat
That’s right. The price of freedom. And but look at what they’re doing. This could potentially be the first revolution made by woman ever in the history of mankind. Isn’t that remarkable? And maybe as we taste and sadly, we’re losing a lot of people and a lot of young ones. My heart aches and I just want to say, stop, please don’t. Let’s not see any more bloodshed. But the more there’s bloodshed, the more it seems like that’s igniting the fire in people.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Shirin, can I ask, what are you working on now?

Shirin Neshat
And my latest work is about how, for example, the female body consistently has been an object of desire, but objects a violation and violence. You know, it’s very odd, ironic that I shot a video and working on photographs since last spring that is about women who become sexually assaulted, particularly as political activists in Iranian prisons. It came to me after I listened to many, many trials of interrogators who finally had to confess to the way that they were murdering political prisoners, but particularly raped and sexually assaulted women. And these women and consequently a lot of them committed suicide because they never were able to recover, even if they were freed. So my latest video is about a woman who basically was freed and able to come to the United States but never was able to cope with reality with life again.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That new work will be exhibited at the Gladstone Gallery in New York this January. There are so many artists like Shirin who’ve been making art that feeds into the protest movement and there have also been people posting art inspired by the movement and those artists are playing a really special role. It’s dangerous for this movement to have leaders, but posting art on social media is a way to give it momentum. Before I let Shirin go, I wanted to ask her about one really prominent example of that.

[‘BARAYE’ BY SHERVIN HAJIPOUR PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s a song called “Baraye” by Shervin Hajipour, and it’s become the anthem of this movement.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The lyrics are based on tweets from people across Iran explaining why they’ve come out to protest. ‘Baraye’ means ‘for’ or ‘because of.’ So the lyrics include things like ‘because of the fear of kissing a loved one’ and ‘for the sunrise after the long, dark nights.’

[‘BARAYE’ BY SHERVIN HAJIPOUR PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Shervin was arrested for posting “Baraye” but has since been released.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m curious if you could tell me a little bit about it and your reflections of it. Like there’s something about it that makes clear that art and music are very important to protests like this.

Shirin Neshat
Yeah, well, I have to explain that first of all, Shervin Hajipour’s song, the lyrics, his voice. It kind of sort of wrapped all our recent history in Iran, all the pain and grief and the suffering of Iranian people. Just with those few words, you know, if you really read the lyrics. So he managed in that short song to touch a nerve in Iranian people from across the board. You know, what I always said in Iran are artists come from the heart of the society and they talk about the people, to the people. We don’t make slogans. We speak and touch the emotions, those raw nerve emotions of the people. So we are told that we are important in this uprising. How beautiful is that? That you as artists feel like you actually play an important role and the people respect you and love you. And we understand that we are who we are because of that. And so we have to give back to them at the time that they’re suffering. And that’s it. That’s it. There’s no way around it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Shirin, thank you so much for joining me. This was really an honour.

Shirin Neshat
Thank you so much for your time.

[‘BARAYE’ BY SHERVIN HAJIPOUR PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’ve put links to Shirin’s work and the song “Baraye” in the show notes.

[‘BARAYE’ BY SHERVIN HAJIPOUR PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
We care a lot more than we used to about animals, how much meat we eat, how the food industry treats animals, how the cosmetic industry treats animals. But there’s one aspect we really don’t talk that much about where animal testing is still very prevalent — medicine. Take, for example, the rules that the US Food and Drug Administration still demands to get a drug to market.

Clive Cookson
Because at the moment, I think the FDA in the US requires one small animal model and two large animal model tests for safety. And that’s a lot.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Clive Cookson, the FT’s science editor. And the numbers add up quickly. They’re said to be around 100mn animal procedures every year around the world. That’s on mice and rats and then on bigger animals like monkeys and dogs. But here’s something that surprised me. Animal testing is actually pretty bad at predicting drug efficacy in humans. So our global pharma correspondent Hannah Kuchler started looking into it.

Hannah Kuchler
Again and again I would go and meet scientists working inside drug companies and they would say, Oh, we have this terrible process and all these hurdles trying to develop this drug, because for this drug, the animal models aren’t very good. And it would just come up again and again. And I was suddenly like are animal models good for anything?

Lilah Raptopoulos
To give you a sense of just how inaccurate animal testing is, for some cancers, the accuracy is just eight per cent using animals. So if a drug works or doesn’t on a mouse, there’s only an eight per cent chance that it’ll have the same effect on a human. But there’s another way where the accuracy is 80%. It’s a method that uses organs that are grown in a lab. It’s pretty amazing. And Clive and Hannah have been covering it. Welcome to the show. So I invited them on to the show. First I needed Clive to explain what exactly we were talking about. Instead of animals, scientists are now testing on human tissues that are grown in a lab from embryo stem cells. The most exciting kind are called organoids.

Clive Cookson
Organoids are miniature human organs, they’re self-contained and tiny, maybe finger or thumbnail or smaller in size, and they will reproduce particular organs.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So picture a tiny miniature liver or kidney without a human attached to it. If you’re doing tests, you can see how a drug affects all of its tissue and all of its functioning. Another thing scientists are able to do now that’s really cool is take the lab-grown organ and then connect it to an electronic circuit that makes the organ act alive. That means you can see it in action. You can see how a drug affects it.

Clive Cookson
Then when that joined together with a micro electronics devices and the fluidics, where you can diffuse the drug or through them and observe what’s going on. That’s often called tissues on a chip or even organs on a chip.

Lilah Raptopoulos
All of this is a real breakthrough, and it’s possible because of advances in genetic engineering. You’re using real human genetic material, not an animal that might approximate us. And you’re observing entire organs in miniature. You’re holding that tiny kidney or liver right in front of you.

Clive Cookson
You can do sort of things to a mouse in the lab, which some listeners might find distasteful. But there’s no way of really looking into a living mouse in the same way as you can look, observe at these human cells in an organoid or on a tissue chip.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow. Are the photos incredible of that?

Clive Cookson
Yes. Photos of brain organoids in particular, where you see them beginning to develop the shape of a real early human embryo. And then you can see the brain developing in the embryo. It is it’s amazing. It’s mind boggling.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But there’s a catch. And that catch is that in real life, livers and kidneys are attached to our bodies. And so if you found a drug that kills liver cancer, but it also poisons your other organs, you’re going to need to know that.

Clive Cookson
What’s hard to reproduce is what’s called the whole systemic effect of a drug on a body. In other words, you can make increasingly sophisticated organoids or tissues on a chip, and you can begin to combine them. But if you want to see how it’s affecting a whole body, I’m afraid you have to use an animal. And I think that’s going to be, I mean, short of we’re not going to have a sort of miniature whole human like thing [laughter] . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
You never know, Clive, sounds like we’re going there. [laughter]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Here’s where it gets interesting. These new technologies mean that we may get a lot more and better drugs coming through the early stages of testing. We’re able to test on organoids, which are effective but disembodied, and skip the mice because they don’t have good track records anyway. But getting better drugs to advance past those initial trials could actually mean that we’ll have to do more testing on large animals like pigs and monkeys. And that’s something most people find a lot harder to stomach than testing on rats and mice.

Hannah Kuchler
If your mouse and your rat doesn’t have the same cells or genes, then you can’t test them very well. But it may be that larger animals, primates especially, are much closer to humans. And so do have those cells and genes. And therefore, you end up in this situation where you end up using more of those.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But that seems like a bad thing. Hannah, right? Like isn’t that the reverse of what we’re trying to do?

Hannah Kuchler
I mean, it is. But I think I think that it’s another reason why people are looking for these technologies more closely is because they know that they can’t just run through blocks of mice and rats and get the right impact. And actually even more accurate than testing in a primate maybe testing on an organoid.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And also like if they’re testing on more big animals in the medium term, in the short term, it also just kind of means that like we’re getting better at saving humans, right? Like we’re getting better at carrying diseases.

Hannah Kuchler
Yeah. Which is obviously good, but yeah it raises questions about how we do it and can we just go straight to the thing that we think is more accurate . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Hannah Kuchler
 . . . and bypass the stage where we try and get, you know, test on more primates.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Clive and Hannah, I’m curious. You know, I saw at the bottom of your piece that someone had written a letter and they said that, you know, these advances in science and technology are really great. But actually it’s important to not ignore the ethical questions of animal testing. I’m curious what you think about it.

Clive Cookson
I think that the ethical issues are important. They’re motivating scientists in drug companies and in research labs. But we should remember that another ethical issue is the need to get better and better at improving human health and treating disease. And therefore, if this line of science, human stem cell research and the organs and tissues you can make from it, improve pharmaceutical R&D, biological research and lead to better drugs, you could say that is part of the ethical imperative for doing it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s a really good point.

Hannah Kuchler
Yeah, I agree with Clive and I would say that actually the ethics are not changing massively. There’s always going to be that debate between, you know, how do we want to treat animals and how do we want to improve human health. But what really interested me during the reporting of this piece was, one, those really stark figures that maybe we realise this, you know, we do this thing that may be considered unethical and it isn’t even that effective.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Hannah Kuchler
 . . . and the discovery that actually what I do think is driving most pharma to do this to improve, you know, their success rate and therefore reduce their costs. And I think that that’s quite a powerful motivator that will also have a side effect of reducing the impact on animals.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. Thank you both. We’ll watch this space. Maybe you can come on again and tell us how this is developing and I really appreciate your time.

Clive Cookson
Thanks, Lilah. Enjoyed it.

Hannah Kuchler
Thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You can read the piece that Hannah and Clive wrote about this with Joe Miller on FT.com. I’ve link to it in the show notes.

That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend the podcast from the Financial Times. Before we go, we are giving you one last week for our listener call out. We’re basically challenging you to challenge us. What is one thing that you think most people would find boring but we could make interesting on the show? There’s a link in the show notes. You just have to tap it and it will bring you to a site where you can leave us a message from whatever device you’re on. It’s really easy. Go ahead over there if you think of something, don’t think too hard about it. We might play it on the show. Next week we are talking about Jane Austen adaptations. I love this conversation. And we’re also talking about the Boston Marathon. The Boston Marathon has recently added a non-binary gender category for its runners. So we’ll talk about what the implications might be on other sports and tournaments if you want to say hi, we love hearing from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter @ftweekendpod, and I’m on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. You can keep up with the call outs and behind the scenes stuff from the show on my Instagram. Links to everything mentioned today are in the show notes alongside a link to the best offers available if you want to take out a subscription to the FT and give it a shot. Those offers are at ft.com/weekendpodcast. Make sure to use that link to get the discount. I am Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s my very talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smith is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer with help this week from producer Persis Love. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and special thanks go as always to Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.