Shirin Neshat — Melkonian & Wendt (Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, 1999)

Shirin Neshat
Text by Neery Melkonian and Selene Wendt (credit to confirm against title page)
Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, in association with Riks-utstillinger (National Touring Exhibitions, Norway), 1999
TNR-2026-0664

15 × 15 cm
80 pp.
Softcover
English / Norwegian, bilingual
ISBN 82-90955-36-7 / 978-82-90955-36-1

Catalogue published to accompany the 1999 touring exhibition Shirin Neshat, shown at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter's Main Gallery 7 August–26 September 1999, with stops also recorded at Tromsø Kunstforening, Bergen Kunstforening and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm — the exact sequence of the tour is unconfirmed and worth checking against the colophon before it's stated as fact.

Neery Melkonian arrived at this text with the ink barely dry on her essay for Shirin Neshat: Turbulent, written for the Whitney Museum's Philip Morris branch only months earlier (October 1998–January 1999). The same critic was, within a single year, building the critical language for Neshat's work in a corporate-sponsored Whitney satellite in Manhattan and in a fjord-side Norwegian kunstsenter founded by an Olympic figure skater and her shipping-magnate husband. 1999 was also the year Neshat won the International Award at the Venice Biennale for Turbulent and Rapture — this modest, square-format, 80-page booklet landed in exactly the year her international reputation properly arrived, at one of the more understated stops on its route.

The cover reproduces a work from Women of Allah (1993–97): a veiled face inscribed with Farsi calligraphy, the veil, the script and the gaze held in the single frame that made the series' reputation. The specific work isn't confirmed from the crop alone and should be checked against the book's own captioning before it's named.

Condition: [to confirm — the back cover carries a taped, handwritten price sticker reading "£11.00," a later UK bookseller's resale tag rather than the original Norwegian cover price, and there's a faint tonal band along the right edge of the rear panel consistent with light shelf fading]