“Do U Dare!”, the Berkeley-trained artist’s meditation on Nasim Aghdam, who opened fire at YouTube’s San Bruno headquarters in 2018, opens at Rome’s MAXXI museum on Nov. 13 after its premiere in Venice.
Shirin Neshat has spent four decades making art about Iran, exile and the lives of women caught between public roles and private selves. Her newest work turns that lens on a California story: the 2018 shooting at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno.
“Do U Dare!”, a trilogy of films and a series of photographs, opens on Nov. 13 at MAXXI, Italy’s national museum of 21st-century art in Rome, where it will run through Jan. 10, 2027, according to the museum. The museum’s description says that “at the heart of the story is Nasim Aghdam, the Iranian-American activist and YouTuber who, in 2018, opened fire at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California, before taking her own life.”
The installation, curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi with Anne Palopoli as associate curator, has been designed specifically for the museum’s Gallery 5. It follows the trilogy’s premiere at Palazzo Marin in Venice, where it was shown from May to September alongside the Venice Biennale. The Venice exhibition closed in September.
The California story at its center
On April 3, 2018, Ms. Aghdam, 38, entered YouTube’s campus in San Bruno, a few miles south of San Francisco, and fired a handgun, wounding three people before she killed herself, The Art Newspaper recounted in its coverage of the Venice premiere. She had lived with her grandmother in Southern California, posted videos as a vegan activist and performer, and accused YouTube of censoring her and cutting off her income from her channel.
Ms. Neshat, who is also Iranian American, has been careful to say that the films are not a biography. “I was immediately interested in this woman who lived in two different worlds,” she told The Art Newspaper. “She was most likely suffering from mental illness. She was a total loner. I was fascinated by this idea of living in your imagination and art being a kind of escape.”
She also described a personal identification with Ms. Aghdam’s sense of displacement. “In many ways, she replicated my own struggles—being exiled and feeling isolated both by Iranian and American cultures, but then finding this third place where you feel free and you are finally able to express yourself,” she said.
Gladstone, the gallery that represents Ms. Neshat, said in its announcement of the Venice show that Ms. Aghdam’s family, who are Bahá’í, had fled Iran to escape persecution when she was a child, and that she built “her own imaginative world online where she performed, sang, and danced in stylized videos that spoke to her longing, rage, protest and a need to be seen.”
The subject is a sensitive one in the Bay Area, where three people were wounded in the attack. In interviews, Ms. Neshat has chosen to stress that the work is “interpretive rather than literal,” as The Art Newspaper put it, and her comments have centered on Ms. Aghdam’s isolation rather than on the attack itself. She has said she would like to make a documentary about Ms. Aghdam in the future.
Three films, three Americas
The three films were shot in New York, not California. According to MAXXI, they move “between an immigrant neighbourhood in Brooklyn, the Wall Street financial district, and the domestic space in the Suburbs where Nasim creates her digital performances.” The Art Newspaper described a protagonist who appears in black and white in public, withdrawn and solitary, and whose world turns to color when she steps inside and in front of the camera.
“My work has always been about paradoxes and dualities,” Ms. Neshat told the publication, “women who are very submissive and quiet, but who can also be extremely rebellious and outspoken and defiant.”
The museum’s text frames the trilogy as a work about the United States as much as about one woman. It says the films lay “bare the contradictions of the American Dream” and question “the power the media holds over our lives.” In an interview with Elle this year, Ms. Neshat described her feelings about her adopted country as divided. “I have lived longer in this country than in my own. This is a country I worship for its idea of democracy,” she said.
From Berkeley to the Biennale
Ms. Neshat, 69, came to the United States as a teenager and studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in painting in 1979 and a Master of Fine Arts in 1982, according to Berkeley’s art practice department and a biography published by Los Angeles Modern Auctions. After the 1979 revolution in Iran, she was unable to return home, and she did not visit again until 1990, she told Elle.
She has been candid that the campus years were not her breakthrough. “I didn’t blossom in art school at Berkeley,” she told Elle. “The failure at school—and, more, my intellectual development as a human being in New York, and exposure to art while working at an art gallery—opened my eyes to what art could be.”
That development came quickly once it started. Her photographic series “Women of Allah,” made in the 1990s, overlaid portraits of Iranian women with Persian calligraphy. Her two-screen video installation “Turbulent” won the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Biennale, and her first feature film, “Women Without Men,” won the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival in 2009.
Who is behind the show
The Venice presentation was organized by Associazione Genesi, an Italian nonprofit founded by Letizia Moratti in 2020 to stage exhibitions on human rights themes, and the Italian bank Banca Ifis, and presented by Gladstone and Lia Rumma Gallery of Milan and Naples, according to Gladstone and The Art Newspaper. A catalog published by Magonza accompanied the premiere, MAXXI said.
The Inquirer sent questions on Sunday to Gladstone, through its press representatives at Resnicow and Associates; to MAXXI; to Lia Rumma Gallery; and to Associazione Genesi’s press office. None had responded by publication. The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which was asked whether it holds or plans to show Ms. Neshat’s work, replied: “Thank you for reaching out. We’re copying our Public Relations Manager, AJ Fox, who can help you with this.” No further response had been received by publication.
For Bay Area audiences, seeing a work rooted in their own region’s recent history will, for now, mean a trip to Rome. MAXXI is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Imogen Saltzman covers UC Berkeley alumni in the arts, letters, culture and public life, including the controversies and courtroom fights that put them in the headlines, for the Inquirer’s Berkeley Alumni desk. More from Imogen Saltzman
