The Iranian artist Shirin Neshat has been living in self-imposed exile since the late 1970s, as she chose not to return to her home country following the ‘79 Islamic Revolution. Through her works Neshat examines Iran before and after the revolution and follows political and civil transformations through strong photographs of women in her country of birth.  My own use of the term exile deals with the analysis of the state of exile in relation to artistic work as a globalized and underlying motivation for art and artists. The new definition of exile is analyzed in relation with the artist’s photographs and the verbal and visual statements. The verbal and visual photographs in the work of Neshat are related to the term exile through different allegories and metaphors that are to be found in lyricist Rumi’s classical poetry, the Bible and the Quran.

The artist’s use of the visual photographs where women appear with hijab covering their hair and with weapons in their hands- in some pictures without any audience at all, in others decorated with different calligraphic texts- are combined with the verbal photograph which is created through music (song) and language. The verbal and visual statements complete one another in a united effort to visualize exile as a term, therefore every attempt to separate these two a part, will inevitably deprive the audience of the statement itself, which is in this case the psychoanalytical inner exile. One does not have to be outside her home to feel the state of exile; it can be felt mentally even if one is at home. The inner exile is a global experience. This form of exile is born when the community is categorized from two extremes, with one side of the equation possessing power and the other being classified as weak and ”the other”. I use the status of women in Iran as an example in my investigation, where women are at home but are still very much outside of it, alienated for their gender (sex).