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Tooba

Photo: Larry Barns Courtesy Gladstone Gallery

Tooba

2002

Shirin Neshat

American, born Iran, 1957

Tooba is a video installation by internationally acclaimed, Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat. Since the early 1990s Shirin Neshat has explored themes of women and Islam, east and west, individual and collective, in monumental, double-screened projected video installations. Inspired by the novel Women without Men by Iranian writer Shahrnoush Parsipour, Tooba, or tree of paradise, centers around an image of the feminine tree, a symbol which originates in the Koran. Filmed in color near Oaxaca, Mexico, Neshat’s poetic allegory employs a style of magic realism and spare elegance, presenting a narrative of tension and transcendence. Tooba was commissioned by Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany.
Color 35mm film transferred to DVD
12 min.
Gift of Jeffrey and Susan Brotman, Jane and David Davis, Barney A. Ebsworth, Jeff and Judy Greenstein, Lyn and Jerry Grinstein, Richard and Betty Hedreen, Janet Ketcham, Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation, James and Christina Lockwood, Michael McCafferty, Christine and Assen Nicolov, Faye and Herman Sarkowsky, Jon and Marry Shirley, Rebecca and Alexander Stewart, Virgnia and Bagley Wright, Charles and Barbara Wright, and Ann P. Wyckoff in honor of Lisa Corrin
2005.141
Photo: Larry Barns Courtesy Gladstone Gallery
location
Not currently on view

Resources

Exhibition HistorySeattle, Washington, Seattle Asian Art Museum, Tooba, Feb. 2006 - Jan. 2007.

Seattle, Washington, Seattle Asian Art Museum, Be/longing: Contemporary Asian Art, Feb. 8, 2020 - ongoing [on view Feb. 8, 2020 - July 10, 2022].

Seattle Art Museum respectfully acknowledges that we are on Indigenous land, the traditional territories of the Coast Salish people. We honor our ongoing connection to these communities past, present, and future.

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