Sotheby's Bets Big on Six-Figure Shirin Neshat Video for Qatar Auction

ARTNEWS
By John Chiaverina

Still from Shirin Neshat’s Passage.

QATAR---On October 13th, Sotheby’s will put Passage, a 2001 video piece by Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, up for auction at its outpost in Doha, Qatar. Filmed in Essouaria, Morocco, Passage is a single channel work depicting three parts of an Islamic funeral procession moving separately and eventually together. Punctuated by an original Philip Glass soundtrack, the piece has a haunting quality. It is Neshat’s defining work, and the artist’s first video to be sold at auction. Sotheby’s estimates that the piece, taken from The Sender Collection, will fetch between $200,000-300,000. Passage–which exists in an edition of 6 with one artist proof–is already included in collections at The Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with two copies of the video in undisclosed private collections. [link]