Background
She is the fourth of five children of wealthy parents, brought up in the religious town of Qazvin in north-western Iran. Neshat's father was a physician and her mother a homemaker. Neshat has stated about her father, “He fantasized about the west, romanticized the west, and slowly rejected all of his own values; both my parents did. What happened, I think, was that their identity slowly dissolved, they exchanged it for comfort. It served their class”. As a part of Neshat’s “Westernization” she was enrolled in a Catholic boarding school in Tehran. Through her father’s acceptance of Western ideologies came an acceptance of a form of western feminism. Neshat’s father encouraged each of his daughters to “be an individual, to take risks, to learn, to see the world", and he sent his daughters as well as his sons to college to receive their higher education. Through her grandparents, her mother's parents, Neshat learnt traditional religious values.
Read more about this topic: Shirin Neshat
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