Shirin Neshat, one of the most famous artists of the Iranian diaspora, is perhaps best known for her landmark photographic series Women of Allah, to which this work belongs. The series portrays chador-clad women in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Often posed with a rifle or gun, their exposed body parts inscribed in black ink, Neshat’s women are strong, even heroic, eroticized by their weapons and sanctioned by the texts they bear. Here, the print shows the side of a woman’s face, the barrel of a gun emerging like a gaudy earring from the shadowy area between her cheek and barely visible chador. She stares outward calmly, her face covered with verses by the Iranian poet Tahereh Saffarzadeh, in which she addresses her brothers in the revolution, asking if she can participate. Although the Women of Allah series was created in response to a specific moment in Iranian history, works such as Speechless continue to resonate today.

• Komaroff, Linda, Stephanie Rouinfar, Sandra Williams, and Sarah Mostafa Ahmed. Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2023. https://archive.org/details/women-defining-women (accessed January 12, 2024).
• Gresh, Kristen. She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2013.

• Komaroff, Linda. Islamic Art Now: Contemporary Art of the Middle East. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015.

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• Komaroff, Linda. "Islamic Art Now and Then." In Islamic Art: Past, Present, Future, edited by Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, 26-56. New Haven, New York, and London: Yale University Press, 2019.