Shurin Nesbat

"Games of Desire" documents a film Shirin Neshat made of courtship rituals she encountered and recorded in Luang Prabang, Laos. The work extends her long study of the boundary between male and female space into a culture outside her native Iran.

Neshat first saw these rituals, in which men and women flirt and negotiate through voice, gesture, and song, during a stay in Luang Prabang in 2005. She returned to film them in 2008. Published by Edizioni Charta in 2009, this 70-page catalogue accompanied the itinerant exhibition of the resulting film at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Brussels (September-October 2009) and the Galerie Jerome de Noirmont in Paris (September-November 2009), with texts by France Morin and Catherine Choron-Baix.

Neshat (b. 1957, Qazvin, Iran) has worked since the early 1990s across photography, video, and film to examine gender, religion, and political power. She began with the "Women of Allah" series of self-portraits inscribed with Persian poetry. "Games of Desire" belongs to the body of video and film work, including "Turbulent," "Rapture," and the feature film "Women Without Men," in which Neshat stages ritual, sound, and the divide between men's and women's worlds as a recurring subject.