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- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday August 23 2000 00.00 BST
Iranian artist Shirin Neshat's Soliloquy, a new double-screen colour film, and Turbulent, her trilogy of double-screen films also showing at London's Serpentine Gallery, form the best contemporary art show in Edinburgh.
Soliloquy, with Neshat as the protagonist, presents a kind of abstracted view of the artist's own position as an Iranian living in the US. She is not, she has said, an exile so much as "distanced" from her homeland. Yet exile she is. Two screens, two cultures: Soliloquy finds the artist in both the ancient town of Mardin in southern Turkey (itself a place of political and cultural dispute) and a generic American cityscape. She appears to belong in neither place; Soliloquy dramatises her position. Neshat stands at a window, overlooking American rail tracks and urban highways; and she appears at a window in Mardin, overlooking a courtyard. She flees across a barren Turkish landscape, and runs along a bleak, deserted American sidewalk. Compared with the brevity, power and formal complexities of Turbulent, Soliloquy's metaphors are a little obvious, the poetry strained.
Till September 23. Details: 0131-225 2383.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable
** Mediocre * Terrible
