The making of Logic of the Birds

Shirin Neshat, May 2002

Sussan Deyhim during filming of Logic of the Birds

Logic of the Birds is a non-literal re-adaptation of the mystical text by the Persian philosopher and poet, Attar. Our narrative, which is a combination of film, music and performance, traces a mass of people, without clear identities (birds), who follow a mythical leader through a difficult, transformative journey, only to discover in the end that they contain within themselves the qualities they searched for in the leader. In this work we have attempted to extract what we consider the essence of the philosophical text and its message of self-revelation, presented in an exercise of visual, lyrical, musical, and performative symbiosis.

Logic of the Birds explores the dynamic / attraction between the mass and a female protagonist (Sussan Deyhim as the equivalent of Attar's hoopa bird) whose nature is uniquely both human and divine as well as compassionate and devilish, focusing on the development and transformation of this relationship. Conceptually and visually, Logic of the Birds explores the concepts of illusion and reality and individual and collective which are fundamental aspects of Persian and Islamic mysticism.

One of the themes that infuses our work is the perception of Iran's cultural shift from a Persian identity to an Islamic one. In an article in The New York Times, Shoja described it as follows: "Persian culture is 5,000 years old, and the Islamic invasion only happened 1,500 years ago. The history of Iran is resistance to domination through a mystical approach to Islam. Basically, what We are doing is trying to make sense of this confused identity, to go back to our roots and translate them into a universal language."