Logic of the Birds

A collaboration between visual artist Shirin Neshat and performer Sussan Deyhim, Logic of the Birds was a presentation of simultaneous filmed and live performance in Islington’s Union Chapel in 2002. Working with writer Shoja Azari and cinematographer Ghasem Ebrahimian, Neshat and Deyhim fused film, music and live performance to explore the tradition of 12th century Persian mysticism and its relationship to contemporary society. Loosely based on the writings of Persian poet and mystic Farid al-Din Attar, Logic of the Birds relates an arduous mystical journey.

Within a specially created environment animating the gothic interior of Union Chapel, Sussan Deyhim’s voice embodied the main character mixing “ancient lament and explosive avant-garde sound” (NY Times). Singing in Farsi she led a silent chorus of men and women – both performing on film and live beside her on stage - in a delicate alchemy of image, action, sound and space. The hour-long performance was set against one panoramic screen projection focusing on a woman’s fantastical journey and two side panels following the oppressive movements of an anonymous crowd.
Logic of the Birds was the central part of the 2002 Intimations of Immortality festival in London, previously performed that year in New York and Minneapolis.

Image: Still from the film that formed part of the performance at The Union Chapel, featuring Sussan Deyhim and a choir, emerge from the charred horizon, obscured by smoke and flames in the foreground, 2002. Still: Shoja Azari, Sussan Deyhim, Ghasem Ebrahimian and Shirin Neshat

Making Logic of the Birds

By Shirin Neshat

The making of Logic of the Birds

Shirin Neshat, May 2002

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."

Making Logic of the Birds

By Michael Morris

The making of Logic of the Birds

By Michael Morris, June 2002

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.

Image: Sussan Deyhim is seen floating arms open in a flooded quarry. The choir watches on stage as she sinks into the green water, during Logic of the Birds, 2002.

Press

Selected Press

Logic of the Birds finds Neshat moving away from her familiar black and white into colour. Based on The Conference of the Birds, a fable by the 12th-century Sufi poet and philosopher Farid al'Din Attar, the hour-long piece incorporates film, music and live staging. "We were interested in experimenting with the idea of bringing film-making and live performance closer together, to the point where the narrative is conveyed through the film but is also unfolded on the stage. — Richard Williams, The Guardian, 31 October 2002.

This is a multimedia production inspired by Farid al-Din Attar's 12th-century Persian epic, The Conference of the Birds. His name "attar" loosely means "perfume seller". How perfect, then, that smell is the first sense stimulated as you enter the candle-lit venue full of pungent, musky incense. For this Artangel project, Shirin Neshat, the artist best known for her feminist take on Islamic society, is back with her regular collaborators - the writer Shoja Azari, the film-maker Ghasem Ebrahimian and the singer and composer Sussan Deyhim (all fellow Iranian exiles in New York). Deyhim, well-known for her interpretations of traditional Persian music, plays the protagonist on stage and in film footage seen on three screens." — Alex O'Connell, The Times, 8 November 2002.

Transporting us into a realm of affecting if abstract vocal imagery, the work was produced in collaboration with cinematographer Ghasem Ebrahimian and writer Shoja Azari, and the lighting was brilliantly choreographed by Stan Pressner who succeeded in transforming the Gothic interior of the Union Chapel into a truly other-worldly realm for the duration of the performance. — Richard Dyer, Contemporary Magazine, Issue 46, January 2003.

About the Artists

Shoja Azari, Sussan Deyhim, Ghasem Ebrahimian and Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat has gained wide acclaim for her explosive work in photography, film, and video installations dealing with feminism, representation of the veil, and the interaction between traditional and modern values. The winner of numerous awards - including the Grand Prix of the Kwangju Biennial in Korea (2000), the Golden Lion Award, and the First International Prize at the 48th Venice Biennial (1999) - Neshat's photographs and videos have been exhibited at the Kunsthalle Wien, The Serpentine Gallery, The Art Institute of Chicago, SITE Santa Fe, the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Whitney Biennial, Biennial of Sydney, Lyon Biennial, and Carnegie International. She has also participated in the San Francisco, Rotterdam and Telluride film festivals. In 2009 she was awarded the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival for her first feature length film Women without Men.

Sussan Deyhim

Sussan Deyhim is a composer, vocalist and performance artist known for her hypnotic vocals layered against complex electronic backgrounds of rhythmic patterns and percussive effects. Born in Teheran, Deyhim began her creative work as a ballet and folk dancer at Tehran's Pars National Ballet, and studied and performed with Maurice Bejart's Ballet of the Twentieth Century in Brussels for almost 4 years before moving to New York. With Richard Horowitz, she produced numerous albums and film scores, including Desert Equations-Azax/Attra and Majoun on Sony Classicalóa. She has also collaborated with Ornette Coleman, Peter Gabriel, Talvin Singe, Jah Wobble and Heiner Goebells, released several solo albums and appeared at Montreux Jazz festival, Central Park Summer Stage, the Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican theatre in London.

Shoja Azari

Shoja Azari is a writer, film director and actor. In 1998, he played the lead role in Shirin Neshat's video installation, Turbulent. Since then, he has co-edited and co-written several films with Neshat as well as created three films of his own, The Story of the Merchant and the Indian Parrot, Married Couple, and The Penal Colony. Azari is a graduate of Hunter College.

Ghasem Ebrahimian

Ghasem Ebrahimian came to New York to study filmmaking and graduated from SUNY at Purchase in 1979. In 1980, he co-founded Ebradfilms, which produced over forty documentaries for RAI-Italian and French Television, including works on Simone de Beauvoir, Richard Burton and Marguerite Yourcenar. His feature-length film, The Suitors, was an Official Selection at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival - Director's Fortnight. He has taught filmmaking at the School of the Visual Arts in New York City, and since 1997, has collaborated with Shirin Neshat on filmed video installations.

Production Credits

Music Production

Sound Engineer — Joe Albano
Cello — Dawn Buckholtz Avery
Voice/keyboards/sound design/producer/composer — Sussan Deyhim
Violin — Adellah El Miry
Keyboards/Ney/Prodcuer/Composer — Richard Horowitz
Tablas — Karsh Kale
Contrabass Bassoon/Contrabass Clarinet/Esraj/Bass Flute — Jaron Lanier
Guitar/Guitar Samples — David Torn
Bendir/Daf/Percussion — Glen Velez
Mixed music by Joe Albano, Sussan Deyhim, Richard Horowitz
Live music mixed by Richard Horowitz
Live music consultant Joe Albano

Film Production

Editors — Sam Neave, Walfred Swanson, Mass MoCA
Art Direction — Shahram Karimi
Production Manager — Larry Smallwood
Coordinator — Sue Killam
Assistant Camera — Jesse Scolaro
Production Coordinator — David Burke
Crew Chief — Michael Pontier
House Sound — Engineer Don Williams
House AV — Keith Noguiera
Master Carpenter — Gary Bourdon
Master Electrician — Peter Wiegand
Electrics Stage Hand — Nathan Flemming
Company Manager — Bethany DeMarco
Gaffer — Max Jones
Key Grip — Todd Wheel
Sound — Dan Mazur
Costume Assistant — Jacy Barber
Still Photography — Kevin Kennefick

Read the complete production credits

Credits

Commissioned by Artangel along with Change Performing Arts, The Kitchen, Walker Art Center, and RLG Productions in the United States. The performance was made possible with support from the Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund, and with public funds from the New York State Council for the Arts.

Additional support was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts for a partnership between The Kitchen and MASS MoCA, as well as The Peter Norton Family Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, The Soudavar Memorial Foundation and individual contributors. Logic of the Birds is also a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Artangel is generously supported by Arts Council England, and by the private patronage of The Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels and The Company of Angels.