Shirin Neshat on Directing Aida at Salzburg Festival

Iranian visual artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat made her opera directorial debut with Giuseppe Verdi's Aida at the Salzburg Festival in August 2017, under the musical direction of Riccardo Muti. In an exclusive interview, Neshat discusses the challenges and inspirations behind the production, which aimed to strip away Orientalist clichés and return to the opera's pure emotional core. She collaborated closely with Muti, whom she met through Salzburg Festival director Markus Hinterhaeuser, and with soprano Anna Netrebko. Neshat drew on her own video installations—such as Rapture (1999), Fervor (2000), and Passage (2001)—for the staging's graphic design, spatiality, and choreography. The production's lighting, particularly in the final tomb scene, echoed her photographic series The Home of My Eyes, exhibited at Museo Correr in Venice. Neshat also addressed criticism from Middle Eastern intellectuals who view Aida as an Orientalist work, asserting the opera's universal themes. She identified personally with the protagonist's exile and struggle against political and religious tyranny, reflecting her own experience as an exile after the Iranian Revolution.