Shirin Neshat's film installation Turbulent, one of the works included in her new exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in Dublin, is projected on two opposing screens. On one we see a man, Shoja Azari, singing a love song, with a lyric by the 13th-century Iranian mystic Rumi, to an appreciative male audience. On the other a woman, Sussan Deyhim, waits until he has finished, then, as if in reply, launches into a fierce, impassioned song that is "a tapestry of voices, a mosaic of primal utterances". She performs with incredible intensity, but she performs for an empty theatre.
Though based in the United States, Neshat is Iranian, and her work clearly refers to the renewal in 1979, in post-revolutionary Iran, of a ban on women singing in public. Deyhim refuses to be silenced, but as the nonplussed male audience opposite attests, her enforced silence would be a huge loss, the absence of a necessary dialogue. And the piece is not just a critique, a lament; it is also descriptive of women's strategies of resistance.
Straightforward in concept and extremely well made, composed and performed, Turbulent, which won the main award at the Venice Biennale in 1999, is a powerful piece of work. It takes on an enormous subject - contemporary Islam - in a direct but subtle way, neatly sidestepping the tendency towards polarisation that can easily characterise representations of one culture from the viewpoint of another, particularly when ideological antagonisms are added to the mixture.
This relates not only to Neshat's Iranian background but also to her interesting, and by no means obvious, decision to "remain within the framework of the social, cultural and religious codes, to maintain the given boundaries" of Islam in her work.
It was a decision partly inspired by her admiration for the new Iranian cinema, which has been a huge, readily acknowledged influence on her. In retrospect it was a good idea, encouraging her development of a restricted but consistent, readily understandable visual vocabulary, made up of black-chador-clad women and white-shirted men, of public and private spaces, of heavily ritualised actions. It is a vocabulary both specific and universal. And, of course, it allows her to be a critic of a society, a culture, entirely on its own terms, without adopting an external, intrinsically alien viewpoint. Even so, in 1999 she was apparently advised not to return to Iran; she has since used locations elsewhere, including Turkey and Morocco.
Neshat has said she views her work as a visual discourse on the subjects of feminism and contemporary Islam. Turbulent is the first part of a trilogy, completed by Rapture and Fervour, that imaginatively explores this territory in terms of issues of gender. Rapture counterpoints the social activities of a group of men in a fortress with the peregrinations of a group of women dispersed over the landscape - Neshat is a virtuoso in her use of spaces and their connotations - and, eventually, setting out to sea in a small boat. The emblematic figures and the ritualised patterns of movement in a landscape recall the relatively neglected cinema of the Hungarian director Mikl≤s Jancs≤.
Where Rapture looks at men and women in terms of social groupings, Fervour, which hinges on an exchange of glances, addresses the subject of desire thwarted by religious, ideological prohibition. As with Turbulent, there is a sense of an absent, yearned-for dialogue, but, again, the disjuncture at its centre has reverberations beyond Islamic society.
Neshat was born in the town of Quzvin, in north-west Iran, in 1957. Her father, a doctor, idealised Western cultural values and was in favour of the Shah's modernisation and westernisation programme.
In line with her father's thinking, she was despatched to university in the United States, at a time when dissent was growing in Iran, an experience that effectively accelerated the erosion of her sense of cultural identity. Although she settled in America, completing an MA in fine art, marrying (twice, first an American, then a Korean), having a child and working in the gallery business, she never really assimilated in the sense of accepting the Western art world as her own.
There are hints in various interviews and articles that when she returned to Iran, in 1990, she was psychologically in need of something like the pervasive ideological framework the country presented to her; a framework she could claim as her own, however critically.
In her rush to identify with what she found, she was perhaps overenthusiastic. In fact, she says, somewhat disparagingly, of the work made initially under the impetus of her renewed contact with Iran, that it has "that kind of naivety of an artist living abroad, returning and very sincerely wanting to understand".
Despite her reservations, it is too complex to be labelled as simply propagandist - something she has been wary of. It stands up very well and, justifiably, made a considerable impact, partly because no one else was doing anything like it. It consists of two series of photographs, Women Of Allah and Unveiling, in which the subject is often herself, wearing a black chador.
It made sense to depict herself, because she had identified the female body as being central to the value system, the dominant ideology, of Iranian society. Her images combine individuality - her very definite self - the submissiveness and uniformity implied by the chador and militancy, manifested in the presence of guns - referring to the role of women in the revolution and in the Iran-Iraq War.
But there is also Farsi poetry, beautifully inscribed on the flesh - and in one case the eyeballs - in the photographs. The feminist critic Farzaneh Milani identifies many of the texts as "exquisitely rebellious poetry by pioneering women poets". So, in effect, the images are striking articulations of woman's body in contemporary Islam.
A recurrent theme in interviews is Neshat's move from static photographic images to video and film. These are, necessarily, collaborative arts, and most of her work is collaborative. Also, it is made within a small, tight-knit community of like-minded talents, which includes the cinematographer Ghasem Ebrahimian, the actor Shoja Azari, the producer Hamid Fardjad and Deyhim, who composes the music for all of Neshat's films, with the exception of Passage, which is a collaboration with the composer Philip Glass. Neshat makes it clear that she works very closely with these colleagues, and that they throw their energies into each others' projects.
In one interview, she points out a simple truth: "the general public gets more absorbed in films than in any other form of art . . . cinema and television are a major part of popular culture. I am afraid that visual art is a far more isolated and inaccessible world for the general public." Hence her use of narrative, albeit in a stylised, ritualistic way, in the form of her strangely schematic, precisely choreographed allegories.
In their strictures they could well come across as didactic and inflexible - in line with popular conceptions of Islam, perhaps - but they do not. They do not because in narrative terms they are open structures; they are like, say, the interlocking patterns of Islamic ornamentation rather than a representational Western painting with a single perspective. They have a curious symmetry and abstraction, so we can explore them from any angle and interpret them at will. As she puts it: "the narrative is non-literal, abstract and often quite ambiguous; the viewer must rely heavily on her or his own imagination to draw meanings."
Film installations and photographs by Shirin Neshat are at IMMA (01-6129900), Dublin, from tomorrow until December 16th
