Sayed, from the series Our House is on Fire

In 2012, Iranian artist Shirin Neshat and her collaborator Larry Barns took up residence in Cairo. Living near Tahrir Square—the center of Egypt’s Arab Spring uprisings months prior—the two encountered “grieving elderly and impoverished Egyptian men and women who [had] endured tremendous personal and national losses.” Neshat and Barns then photographed these Cairenes, drawing inspiration from their stories to imbue the final portraits with potent emotion. On view here are Ghada and Sayed, two examples from the series, titled Our House Is on Fire. Each portrait is overlaid with a thin veil of barely visible script. Written in Farsi and taken from various Iranian texts, Neshat’s calligraphy is deliberately almost indecipherable, to, in her words, “mirror the way in which national calamity has become embedded in and inseparable from [the subjects’] personal histories of tragedies.” As she elaborates, she is interested in the “intersection of an individual with the world, art and politics, poetry and violence.” These portraits were commissioned by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2012 as part of its Artist as Activist program. Established in 2011, the Artist as Activist initiative provides “resources to artists of all disciplines, including visual, performing, media, design, and other creative professions, who address important global challenges through their creative practice.” In 2015, the Foundation committed to gifting Ghada and Sayed to colleges and universities around the world. The University of Texas at Austin was one of thirty-six institutions to be awarded Neshat’s work.