Shirin Neshat is the best-known artist of the Iranian diaspora. In her series The Book of Kings, she brings forward to the present the inherent nationalism of the Shahnama, the Iranian national epic, using portraits of friends and acquaintances with hands crossed diagonally over their hearts to depict patriots. She also created a smaller group of villains, as seen here, represented by full-length male portraits with tattoo-like battle scenes from the Shahnama covering their bare upper torsos, for which Neshat relied on her copy of an early-twentieth-century lithograph edition of the Shahnama.