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Roja

The single channel film Roja is part of a trilogy of film installations titled Dreamers which explore the world of women’s dreams. Conceptually the video installation revolves around a single female protagonist whose emotional and psychological narrative remain on the border of dream and reality; madness and sanity; and consciousness and sub-consciousness as she faces her own distinct inner anxieties. “I have been haunted by the power of dreams for years” says Neshat, “I am fascinated by how in a state of dream, the boundaries in between madness and sanity, reality and fiction, conscious and subconscious are blurred and broken” (2016). Dreamers is based on aspects of the artists own dreams. Roja’s character and dilemma in many ways resembles hers: the fear of the ‘stranger’ and the ‘strange land,’ and desire for a reunion with ‘home’ with ‘mother,’ with the ‘motherland’ that seems welcoming at first but becomes terrifying and demonic in the end.