ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa

Scope and Contents The introduction to this book was written by Hal Foster.Amazon.com Reviews; Library Journal: Bluntly ambiguous and confrontational, Kruger's unmistakable work evokes an urgent desire to examine and get real about the complexity of human experience in the face of reductive politics and consumer culture. She is best known for images that play with the visual language of advertising: Signature red or white banners of text stamped on black-and-white photographs blast viewers with statements like "Your body is a battleground" (over the face of a woman) or "I shop therefore I am" (in a red square held like a credit card in a large hand). These and many other equally provoking works--including her early explorations pairing photographs and text, humorous sculptures, and full-room installations--make up the first comprehensive retrospective of Kruger's work, which opened last October in Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art and will travel to the Whitney in New York later this summer....

Scope and Contents

This issue consists of black & white photographs of western United States landscapes with cardboard letters scattered in the image. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

This book consists of photographic reproductions of photographic portraits done by Neshat that feature Iranian women with calligraphic poetic texts written in Farsi on their uncovered body parts. The first photographic reproduction in this book is entitled "I Am Its Secret" and is held by the Sackner Archive. It is a portrait of Neshat's covered head, wrapped in a black chador, with only her eyes and nose exposed. Her skin is covered with black and red Farsi text written in a circular pattern.In an introductory essay, Francesco Bonami writes that "all the work of Shirin Nesht develops along the border where bigotry and spirituality touch but don't merge." She politicizes the oriental woman who gazes with a seductive innocence that is at the same time extraordinarily shrewd. As the writer Hamid Dabashi states, "From the verbal to the visual, Shirin Neshat turns the body into the written and photographed page of a banned book." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.