Shirin Neshat at Milan's PAC: the largest exhibition ever done in Italy on the Iranian artist

From March 28 to June 8, 2025, PAC in Milan presents Body of Evidence, the largest retrospective ever dedicated in Italy to Shirin Neshat (Qazvin, 1957), Iranian artist, photographer and filmmaker among the most influential figures incontemporary art. Curated by Diego Sileo and Beatrice Benedetti, the exhibition traces more than 30 years of her production, revealing the visionary power of a work capable of combining aesthetics and political engagement, symbolism and memory, denunciation and visual poetry. Neshat’s artistic research has developed in the dialogue between her Iranian roots and the experience of exile in the United States, where she moved in 1975. The 1979 Islamic revolution profoundly marked her path, forcing her to a forced detachment from her homeland and fueling an ongoing reflection on identity, power and the role of women in Middle Eastern societies. Through photography, video and film, Neshat has been able to shape an intense visual language in which elements of Persian culture are interwoven with a strongly contemporary sensibility. Promoted by the Municipality of Milan - Culture and realized in collaboration with the PAC and Silvana Editoriale, the exhibition is included among the highlights of Milan Art Week, is part of the program that, in conjunction with miart, will transform the city into a stage dedicated to art in all its forms from April 1 to 6.

“The exhibition dedicated to Shirin Neshat,” said Tommaso Sacchi, Councillor for Culture of the Municipality of Milan, "represents a unique opportunity to explore the work of an artist who, through a powerful and layered visual language, has been able to tell the complex tensions between identity, memory and belonging. Body of Evidence invites us to reflect on the relationship between individual and collectivity, between history and contemporaneity, offering a timely reading of the challenges of our time. With this project, the PAC confirms itself as the privileged space for confrontation on the great themes of contemporaneity, and the exhibition, among the central events of the 2025 edition of Milano Art Week, stimulates a profound reflection on changing identities, the contradictions of modernity and the power of art to become a vehicle for change and awareness."

The exhibition itinerary

The exhibition at PAC unfolds through an itinerary that brings together some of the artist’s most iconic series. Portraits from the Women of Allah series (1993-1997), which combine Persian calligraphic writing with images of women, evoke the dualism between repression and self-determination, religion and resistance. These works, among Neshat’s most celebrated, explore how the female body has been historically instrumentalized by religious and political ideologies.

The tour continues with Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Soliloquy (1999), three works that established Neshat on the international stage and that, through the use of double projection, stage the tensions between the male and female worlds in Islamic society. In Rapture, contrasting images of men in a crumbling architecture and women on a deserted beach suggest the idea of eternal separation, while in Soliloquy the artist herself appears in two opposing scenarios, one Western and one Middle Eastern, reflecting on the condition of the exile.

Another core of the exhibition is Land of Dreams (2019), a photographic and film project that marks an important evolution in the artist’s work. Made in the United States, this cycle of works explores the relationship between the individual and power, resulting in a dreamlike narrative that reveals the anxieties and fears of contemporary society. Neshat pushes beyond the boundaries of her personal experience to address universal themes, questioning the concept of dreams as a reflection of the cultural and political tensions of our time. Among her most recent works, The Fury (2023) focuses on gender-based violence, using the female body as a battlefield to narrate experiences of abuse and resistance. With a powerful aesthetic and an emotionally intense narrative, the video invites the audience to confront the scars, visible and invisible, left by patriarchal coercion. Alongside this work, the exhibition also presents Fervor (2000) and Roja (2016), two works in which Neshat explores the sense of foreignness, incommunicability, and the blurred boundary between reality and dreams.

Collateral events and publications

The exhibition is part of the official program of theMilan Cortina 2026 Cultural Olympiad and is one of the flagship events of Milan Art Week. As part of the exhibition, the PAC will organize a series of meetings and screenings to explore Neshat’s poetics. On Monday, March 31, the Cineteca Milano will host a special screening of the film Land of Dreams (2021), directed by Shirin Neshat with Shoja Azari, which marks the artist’s entry into narrative cinema. The film, set in a dystopian future, explores the theme of state surveillance and control through the journey of a photographer charged with collecting the dreams of citizens. Accompanying the retrospective, a catalog published by Silvana Editoriale will collect critical essays, a previously unpublished interview with the artist and a comprehensive overview of his most recent production. The volume will be enriched by an iconographic apparatus documenting the exhibition, offering readers an in-depth look at the evolution of Neshat’s visual language.

Artist Notes.

Shirin Neshat, an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York City, constantly explores and experiments with different expressive languages, including photography, video, film, and opera. Her poetically and politically charged creations address themes such as power, religion, race, gender and the relationship between past and present, East and West, individual and collective. His gaze, deeply marked by the experience of exile, transforms these reflections into striking images and narratives.

His works have been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at institutions of international prominence, including the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, The Broad in Los Angeles, the Museo Correr in Venice, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Over the course of her career, Neshat has directed three feature films, Women Without Men (2009), awarded the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017) and Land of Dreams (2021), which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. His debut in opera directing came in 2017 with Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg Festival, revived in 2022 and scheduled for 2025 at the Paris Opéra. Among the many awards she has received are the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), the Hiroshima Prize for Freedom (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006), and the prestigious Praemium Imperiale, awarded to her in Tokyo in 2017.

Shirin Neshat at Milan's PAC: the largest exhibition ever done in Italy on the Iranian artist

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