The making of Logic of the Birds

Michael Morris, June 2002

Production still from Logic of the Birds

I sat with Shirin Neshat and Roselee Goldberg in Kensington Gardens during the summer of 2000, having just seen Shirin's film installations at the Serpentine. We imagined what it might be to experience works such as this with the added dimension of a live presence, thinking particularly of Sussan Deyhim, Shirin's longstanding collaborator, who I remembered for her blistering performances whilst she lived in London in the 1980s. We also imagined what it would be like for Shirin's signature veiled crowds to have a presence on stage as well as on screen.

Logic of the Birds came out of a shared desire to realise this vision. The first space we imagined making it for was a trio of massive disused oil drums under Tate Modern. Nick Serota had taken James Lingwood and I down there with a group of other producers in the late 1990s. As far as we knew, no refurbishment had taken place since and it felt like somewhere to return to with Shirin and Sussan in mind. Health and safety issues defeated us, however - a rare example.

Instead, we turned to the neo-Gothic Union Chapel in Islington, established by a congregation of non-conformists in the early nineteenth century who even now are responsible for identifying and employing their minister. This history of self-determination and nonconformity made Union Chapel feel doubly appropriate for a contemporary work inspired by similar themes in Attar's masterpiece of classical Persian literature.