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The fascination in looking for Shirin Neshat lies not in alternative realities, but in the attraction it can create between the sexes. In her film installation Fervor and this subsequent triptych Fervor (Couple at Intersection), 1999, Neshat documents the forbidden exchange of glances between a man and woman in Iranian society. This work offers, therefore, an alternative interpretation of the power of “looking.” “The (male) gaze,” a term coined by the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey to describe a dominating view of passive subjects, has been a way to describe the inequality of power involved in who looks and who is looked at. Traditionally in Western art of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, this has meant men looking at women. In the Suite Vénitienne, 1980, Sophie Calle turns the tables on this relationship, by following a man to Venice and watching him without his knowledge for almost two weeks. Through this elaborate performance, Calle performs the voyeurism, mystery, fear, abuse of power, indiscretion, and distance involved in such a commanding view.
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