Shirin Neshat Sarah, 2016 Single-channel video projection, black and white, sound Variable Dimensions
The single channel film 'Sarah' is the third film in a trilogy of film installations titled Dreamers which explore the world of women’s dreams. According to Neshat, Sarah is “about the unfolding journey of a woman as she recollects and breathes annihilation, as she faces residues of destruction, violence, genocide, and mortality in a state of dream. Sarah’s anxieties and fears at last force her to plunge into imagining her own death.” While not restricted to any particular time or place, the work is intended to reference a collective sense of anxiety and fear, part of the global experience in a world fraught with conflict.
Neshat says: “In my opinion, rational interpretations of dreams never seem to properly capture their true meanings and significance within human psyche. So Sarah is an effort to make sense of the more subliminal emotional and psychic universe that lives deep inside of us, but are difficult to explain through words.