These artists explore the vital role of ritual in moments of grief

When the artists Sarah Brahim and Shirin Neshat first met in New York, it was – in Neshat’s own words – as if they’d known each other forever. For Brahim, images made by Neshat had always had a “coming-of-age” quality; the former would have been just seven years old when the latter won a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999. For Neshat, on the other hand, Brahim represents a “younger generation” adept at moving fluidly between different forms including choreography, performance, photography, and film, as well as different cultures from East to West.

“As young as Sarah is, there’s so much emotion in her work, because she’s gone through a lot for her young age,“ Neshat adds. “When an artist has something to say that goes [right] to your gut... it’s something that I always try to achieve, so that was very important to me.”

In September, the fruits of that first meeting are on show at London’s Albion Jeune gallery, where two of Brahim and Neshat’s works are placed in dialogue in an an exhibition titled Cartographies of Presence. Created to accompany a haunting piece of music by Philip Glass, Neshat’s Passage (2001) follows a group of men as they carry a body, wrapped in white cloth, across a beach while a group of black-veiled women dig a grave with their hands. In the distance, a child watches on from behind a pile of stones. The complementary work by Brahim, In Search of an Honest Map (2025), sees the artist trace a looping path through the Saudi Arabian desert in 45ºC heat, before lying down inside it – an act of self-exploration, but also of deep engagement with the environment itself.

There are some obvious parallels: the desert landscapes of Morocco and Saudi Arabia, respectively, the circular rituals surrounding life and death, the body’s role in acts of memory and defiance, and the centrality of spiritual practices tied (if not exclusively) to Islam. “It happened so naturally and organically,” says Neshat of the collaboration, and Brahim agrees. “They pair beautifully,” she says. “A lot of my work and research has been on how grief resides or manifests in the body, our distance from the departed person, and how memory remains through different passages of time or different experiences.”

For Neshat, too, “mourning and the feeling of grief” is a central theme that surfaces in Passage. “I made it when my father died,” she explains, “but there was also another conflict [at the time] between Palestine and Israel, and there were all these corpses of young people being carried... when I made it, I was really inundated with grief.” Needless to say, there’s a dark resonance between that moment and the genocide unfolding in Gaza today, which only serves to emphasise the scale of the violence. But the parallels occur unconsciously, as a by-product of the artwork itself – and the timeless nature of its rituals – rather than an intentional political decision. “Sarah and I are born in a part of the world where it’s so perpetually problematic, there’s hardly any moment that you can rest,” Neshat adds. “You feel so much a part of it, and so engaged. It’s really hard to pull apart what’s personal, and what’s political.”

I was looking to music and movies and books, [but] I wasn’t finding descriptions of how I was feeling... I needed to create my own language to describe grief – Sarah Brahim

Similar to Neshat, Brahim’s work is driven by an emotional “rupture” – the death of her mother. “The level of pain was intolerable,” she says. “It was like... whatever is the opposite of a birth. The removal of a presence. And I think it’s something everybody has to experience, and will.” The universality of grief doesn’t necessarily make it easier to bear, though. “People send you all kinds of messages, but nothing resonates,” she adds. “And I was looking to music and movies and books, [but] I wasn’t finding descriptions of how I was feeling... For me, in practice, I needed to create my own language to describe grief, and look for other symbols and feelings, because I wasn’t finding the consolation and understanding that I needed.”

Both artists work on a “gut level” to some extent. Neshat admits that she didn’t know what many of the characters and symbols in Passage meant until many years later, from the young child who doubles as an autobiographical observer, to the erotic undertones of the choreography. “The best works that I’ve done are the ones [where] I wasn’t completely sure what I was doing,” she says. “Passage really, truly grew out of emotions, and not-quite-understood tendencies, metaphors, and allegories. It’s always a great gift to discover more about your work after it’s created.”

“Sometimes as a person I feel like I really know myself, and then I’m really bored with who I know. But then there are times that I surprise myself. There are elements that I find more mad, and more crazy. And I like that.”

The best works that I’ve done are the ones [where] I wasn’t completely sure what I was doing – Shirin Neshat

Dance is also a common thread for both artists, woven throughout their work, their lives, and their relationships with faith. “I would say that ritual and dance... it’s a constant. It’s a real, true access point to something higher, something beyond you,” says Brahim. “And it brings you into the landscape, which is a place of listening.” This feeling goes all the way back to the artist’s schooldays, when she’d study in a religious school from 8am to 3pm, then attend dance school from 3pm to 10pm. “And for sure the second one was where I had all my spiritual epiphanies, and learned to pray,” she says. “When you see your friend achieve something extraordinary, moving in an elegant way, with such strength, that you’ve watched them build, this is really testing what we were talking about in school... it’s a test of faith, of vulnerability, of community.”

In Iran, Neshat grew up in the religious city of Qazvin, where she remembered feeling “very conflicted” about the conservative religious setting and her progressive family circle. “I prayed every day when I was young,” she says, “but my relationship to Islam was that of shame, of guilt, everything you shouldn’t feel when it comes to religion.” In 1975, she left to study art in California, and never returned to Islam as an organised religion (today, she still lives in the US, as an exile). Far removed from her family, she struggled “emotionally, psychologically, even politically” and sometimes envies people who have maintained a close relationship to their faith, as a guide or a comfort in their lives. “I think part of the reason I became an artist [was that] it’s a way to transcend this daily life, this anxiety,” she adds. “To me, art became everything. It became a way to escape my emotional vulnerability, and put it all inside of something. Art has become a salvation, or a saviour, in a way, to channel questions about life, or about God.”

Art became everything. It became a way to escape my emotional vulnerability, and put it all inside of something – Shirin Neshat

This kind of deep contemplation, in which art doubles as a kind of spiritual practice, is perhaps the strongest tie between the two artworks, and the reason they sit so naturally alongside each other. The best art, of course, inspires others – or gives them the language – to focus their attention in a similar way, and potentially discover something new about themselves. 

“I grew up in an environment where I tried so hard to pray like everyone else, [and] I genuinely never felt anything,” says Brahim. “I was always looking around like, ‘Why don’t I feel it, why isn’t it coming?’” Then, she saw an exhibition of Jonas Mekas’s final work, Requiem (2019), which brought together images of flowers he’d captured over the last 30 years. “It was incredibly moving,” she adds. “It was in an old, deconsecrated church, a single projection, really big. And on a little, handwritten card, they displayed something he wrote: ‘I only pray with my eyes wide open.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve been praying all the time. Just nobody told me before that that’s what I was doing.’”

Cartographies of Presence opens at Albion Jeune in London on September 6, and runs until October 4.