Nel 2025, l’artista Shirin Neshat ha diretto una nuova produzione dell’opera “Aida” di Giuseppe Verdi all’Opéra Bastille di Parigi, dal 24 settembre al 4 novembre. L’allestimento, che ha debuttato in una versione ulteriormente rivista, esplora i temi dell’oppressione delle donne causata dal fanatismo religioso.
- Opera: Aida di Giuseppe Verdi
- Regia: Shirin Neshat
- Luogo: Opéra Bastille, Parigi
- Periodo: 24 settembre – 4 novembre 2025
- https://www.operadeparis.fr/en/season-25-26/opera/aida
- How to choose between love for an enemy general and love for one’s homeland? Such is the dilemma faced by Aida, an Ethiopian princess enslaved in Egypt, who also has to contend with the rivalry of Amneris, the Pharaoh’s daughter, who loves the same man as her, Radamès. Yet it is proud Amneris who begs the priests to pardon Radamès after he unwittingly betrays a military secret. In this work, first performed in 1871 at the Cairo Opera, Giuseppe Verdi alternates epic scenes such as the famous triumphal march with more intimate arias such as “Celeste Aida”. While the context of the work’s creation owes much to the Egyptomania in vogue in the 19th century, the themes of Aida are as timeless as they are universal. This is reflected in the staging by Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat, who, making her Paris Opera debut, emphasises the cruelty of religious fanaticism, so swift to oppress women
Biography
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. She works and continues to experiment with photography, video, film and opera, imbuing them with highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives that question issues of power, religion, race, gender and the relationship between past and present, East and West, individual and collective, through the prism of her personal experiences as an Iranian woman living in exile.
Shirin Neshat has organized numerous solo exhibitions in international museums, including the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Broad in Los Angeles, the Museo Correr in Venice, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D. C. and the Institute of Arts and Design in New York. C. and the Institute of Arts in Detroit. She has directed three feature films: Women Without Men (2009), which won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 66th Venice Film Festival, Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017) and, most recently, Land of Dreams, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival (2021).
She staged her first opera, Aida, at the Salzburg Festival in 2017 and 2022. Shirin Neshat has been awarded the Golden Lion, the First International Prize at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006) and, in 2017, the Praemium Imperiale Prize in Tokyo. She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York, Goodman Gallery in London and Lia Rumma Gallery in Milan and Naples.
Debut at the Opéra national de Paris