shirin-neshat with Charlie Rose Show

Background
Neshat’s parents were upper middle-class. Her father was a well-respected physician and her mother a homemaker. watch the video
shirin-neshat

Neshat’s parents were upper middle-class. Her father was a well-respected physician and her mother a homemaker. She grew up in a westernized household that adored the Shah of Iran and his ideologies. Neshat has stated about her father, “He fantasized about the west, romanticized the west, and slowly rejected all of his own values; both my parents did. What happened, I think, was that their identity slowly dissolved, they exchanged it for comfort. It served their class” (Mackenzie 3). As a part of Neshat’s “Westernization” she was enrolled in a Catholic boarding school in Tehran. She found the environment cold and hostile in comparison to her caring family.

Through her father’s acceptance of Western ideologies came an acceptance of a form of western feminism. Neshat’s father encouraged his daughters to “be an individual, to take risks, to learn, to see the world” (MacDonald 3), and he sent his daughters as well as his sons to college to receive their higher education