PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea presents Body of Evidence, the major solo exhibition of Iranian born artist Shirin Neshat (1957, Qazvin), winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Art Biennale in 1999, the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival in 2009 and the Praemium Imperiale Award in Tokyo in 2017.
Body of Evidence is promoted by the Municipality of Milan and produced by PAC and Silvana Editoriale. The exhibition, open to the public from Friday, 28 March to Sunday, 8 June 2025, is one of the main events of Milano Art Week (1 – 6 April) which will turn the city into a stage dedicated to art in all its forms, on the occasion of miart – Milan’s modern and contemporary art fair.
“The exhibition dedicated to Shirin Neshat represents a unique opportunity to explore the work of an artist who, through a powerful and multilayered visual language, has masterfully conveyed the complex tensions between identity, memory, and belonging. Body of Evidence invites us to reflect on the relationship between the individual and the collective, between history and contemporaneity, offering a precise interpretation of the challenges of our time,” said Tommaso Sacchi, Deputy Mayor for Culture of the Municipality of Milan. “With this project, PAC reaffirms itself as a privileged space for dialogue on the great themes of contemporary society, and the exhibition – one of the key events of the 2025 edition of Milano Art Week – encourages deep reflection on shifting identities, the contradictions of modernity, and the power of art as a vehicle for change and awareness.”
Two events mark the opening of the exhibition: on Friday, 28 March, at 11:00 AM, Shirin Neshat meets students at PAC to talk about her work. On 31 March, at 8:30 PM, PAC and Cineteca Milano present Land of Dreams (2021) at Cinema Arlecchino, with the participation of Shirin Neshat. The film, directed by the artist and Shoja Azari, premiered at the 78th Venice International Film Festival.
The exhibition at PAC, curated by Diego Sileo and Beatrice Benedetti, spans the artist’s more than 30-year career, with ten video installations and almost 200 photographs, collected by the world’s leading museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, the Guggenheim, New York and Tate Modern.
A multidisciplinary artist, Shirin Neshat works with the mediums of photography, video, film and Opera, creating highly lyrical narrative and politically loaded visions that question the themes of power, religion, race and the relationships between past and present, east and west, individual and collective. Neshat interprets the past and present of her birth country, Iran, and indeed the whole world, from the female perspective: from her debut in the early 1990s with the Women of Allah series, comprising photographs of women whose bodies are inscribed with poetic calligraphy, to The Fury, a video installation that anticipates the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Neshat’s work passes over the theme of gender and uses male/female dualism as a starting point for exploring the tension between belonging and exile, sanity and insanity, dream and reality.
The exhibition opens with the two-channel video Fervor (2000), a historic work from the artist’s first trilogy. It narrates an encounter between a man and a woman, turning attention to what unites them.
The other two parts of the trilogy are screened in the second gallery and instead concentrate on a clear opposition between the genders. Rapture (1999) places the viewer between two facing screens on which a silent dialogue unfolds between a group of men walking along the cobblestone streets of an ancient city and a group of women who emerge from the desert and head to the sea, ready to set sail. Turbulent (1998), which Shirin Neshat won the Golden Lion for at the Venice Biennale in 1999, offers another perspective on the principle of dualism that underpins the universe. The video presents, on two facing stages, the male voice of Shoja Azari, singing a poem by the mystic Rumi (1207–73) and the female voice of Iranian vocalist and composer Sussan Deyhim.
The theatrical setting of Turbulent reappears at the beginning of the more recent video Roja (2016) screened in the third gallery, with an even more dreamlike atmosphere. This piece is a visual reproduction of one of Shirin Neshat’s dreams, in which the artist’s alter ego is played by writer Roja Heydarpour. The film reveals the disorientation through which, in Neshat’s imagination, both American and Iranian culture have the capacity to transform from reassuring environments to unsettling and hostile ones.
The exhibition continues with Land of Dreams (2019), which combines a series of 111 photographic portraits and a double-channel video installation about the dichotomy between east and west, dream and wakefulness, reality and representation. The video traces the activity of an Iranian female photographer who is apparently preparing a piece of reportage on rural America, but is actually part of the Colony, a secret society whose working members receive, select and analyse American citizens’ dreams.
The video The Fury (2023), preceded by three photographs from the same series, offers an account of the trauma suffered by an imaginary female political prisoner, placing the viewer before injustice and the mental state that can derive from it as an extreme form of rebellion.
The PAC’s parterre hosts The Book of Kings (2012), an installation conceived following the birth of the Iranian Green Movement, that arose in reaction to the electoral fraud that saw Ahmadinejad prevail in Iran in 2009. The work includes a selection of portraits on whose bodies are reproduced in ink illustrations and calligraphic texts taken both from the epic poem Shahnameh (The Book of Kings) written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi (1000 AD) as well as from poetic compositions by contemporary writers and prisoners in Iran, bringing out visual and allegorical parallels between Iran’s past and present, as well as dealing with the Iranian concept of “heroism”.
The exhibition is visually dominated by the famous series Women of Allah (1993–1997), on view on the balcony. In these iconic works, the women’s veiled bodies are covered with poetry and decorative motifs, inscribed with ink directly on the photograph. Some of the photographs include weapons and are inscribed with texts by contemporary Iranian women writers that embody diametrically opposing political and ideological views, from the entirely secular Islamic slogans of martyrdom, to poetic meditations.
The exhibition concludes with two colour videos. In Soliloquy (1999), the only work in which Shirin Neshat herself is a main character, the artist embarks upon two parallel journeys in two different contexts, a Middle Eastern city and a Western metropolis, representing her own personal condition, oscillating between her roots and her new nomadic life. Passage (2001) explores the theme of death and the cyclical state that rewinds time upon each rebirth, going over the different stages of a burial in the desert.
A free guide curated by Angela Maderna narrates the exhibition to the visitors.
The exhibition catalogue, that will be available later, is published in English and Italian by Silvana Editoriale and it is the latest monograph on Shirin Neshat. It features works from 1993 to the present. The volume includes essays by the curators and critical essays by Negar Azimi, Adam Geczy, Chrissie Iles and Venetia Porter.
The exhibition is part of the Milano Cortina 2026 Cultural Olympiad, the multidisciplinary and widespread programme that will enliven Italy on the road to the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (6 – 22 February and 6 – 15 March 2026), promoting Olympic values through culture, heritage and sports.
Body of Evidence has been established thanks to PAC’s yearly sponsor Tod’s, with the technical partnership of Coop Lombardia, thanks to Reti S.p.A. and with the support of Vulcano.
Press release from PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea
Image: Shirin Neshat. Still image from Rapture. 1999. Image courtesy of the artist
