Shirin Neshat at Oxford

For the second consecutive year, the Humanitas Chair of Contemporary Art, organised by Ivorypress, took place at the University of Oxford in May 2012. The Magdalen College and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art were delighted to welcome the distinguished artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat as Humanitas Visiting Professor in Contemporary Art at the University of Oxford in 2012. The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art has been developed in close collaboration with and made possible by the generous support of Ivorypress.

Shirin Neshat was born in Qazvin, Iran and moved to the United States in 1974. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Art Institute of Chicago; Serpentine Gallery, London; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, León; and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Shirin was included in the 48th Venice Biennale of Art (1999), Whitney Biennial (2000), Documenta XI (2002) and Prospect.1 New Orleans (2009). She was awarded the First International Award at the 48th Venice Biennale of Art (1999), Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), Lillian Gish Prize (2006) and the Silver Lion at the 66th International Venice Film Festival for her first feature film Women Without Men (2009). OverRuled, her commission for the fourth edition of Performa, premiered in New York in November 2011 and a major retrospective of her work will take place in 2013 at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

She is currently working on her second feature film about the Egyptian singer Oum Kolthum. In addition to conducting masterclasses and seminars with students from across the University, Shirin delivered a free public lecture on the subject of ‘Images and history’ and participated in a free public symposium on the theme of ‘Portraiture: pasts and futures’.