When we can’t scream, the image screams for us.
(Shirin Neshat)
Room 1 – Fervor (2000)
The final chapter of a trilogy that began with Turbulent and Rapture (on view in the other rooms), Fervor unfolds as a lyrical and unsettling inquiry into the sexual dualism within the normative structures of Iranian Islamic society.
At its core, the fleeting appearance of a man and a woman: two subjectivities brushing past each other for the first time in a suspended, arid space devoid of social coordinates—a liminal territory where symbolic order begins to fade.
Their gaze meets—instantaneous, searing—and already becomes the memory of an impossible passion. Yet their bodies turn immediately away, each retreating into their own existential groove, as if summoned by an invisible code.
Their second encounter takes place in a ritualized, codified environment: a public setting—perhaps religious, perhaps political—where male and female presences are divided by a black curtain that cuts through the room like a wound. On one side, men in white shirts; on the other, women cloaked in the blackness of institutional invisibility.
The voice of masculine authority, embodied by a speaker, warns against desire—named as sin and threat.
She, silent, leaves the scene.
The dual-channel projection denies any real possibility of encounter: what unfolds is a parallel coexistence, never converging. A proximity that remains forever potential, never actual.
Fervor speaks not only of the repression of desire, but of how such repression is internalized and normalized by both sexes—an affective grammar learned and repeated over time.
Room 5 – The Fury
The entrance to the room is punctuated by black-and-white photographs that do not merely introduce the work but form an integral part of it. Female bodies, nude and directly exposed, evoke at once sovereignty and vulnerability, pride and wound. Each image is a field of tense forces, where beauty and trauma coexist without reconciliation.
Verses by the poet Forough Farrokhzad—inscribed directly onto the photographs—serve as a counterpoint: words that scar the photographic surface like poetic lacerations. Farrokhzad, who died very young, had already anticipated through her voice the tragedy of female subjectivity reduced to objecthood—desired and violated within a pre-revolutionary patriarchal society.
The dual-channel video installation grows even more stark: the viewer is confronted with the unspeakable reality of institutionalized rape. The protagonists—women imprisoned for political reasons—emerge as survivors of a violence the body can no longer expel, still captive even outside the prison walls.
This is not mere denunciation: The Fury is an act of reclamation, a ritual of symbolic resistance. The female body becomes a battleground and symbolic apparatus—a locus of both power and subjugation.
A body that screams not only for itself, but as an emblem of all negated subjectivities.
The entire exhibition unfolds as an existential passage through female subjectivity in oppressive contexts, while simultaneously offering a visceral reflection on the power of imagery and poetic language as forms of insubordination.
These works do not speak solely of Iran, but of the universal condition of flesh exposed to law, violence, and dissimulation.
The artist delivers a space where intimacy becomes political, and desire—thwarted, wounded, surviving—becomes the raw material through which freedom is reimagined.
In this sense, the exhibition functions as a mechanism of unmasking: each room opens like a wound, but also like a possibility for rewriting.
Visual language becomes ethical act, existential gesture, and finally, aesthetic form.
A radical work that restores to contemporary art its most powerful function: to interrogate the human where the human has been denied.
Writing is a way of resisting what tries to erase us.
(Forough Farrokhzad)
Curated by Diego Sileo and Beatrice Benedetti
March 28 – June 8, 2025
PAC – Pavilion of Contemporary Art
Opening Hours
10:00 am – 7:30 pm / Thursdays 10:00 am – 10:30 pm
Closed on Mondays
