Rapture

Rapture follows Neshat s earlier work about different kinds of duality within the complex political and religious structure of contemporary Islam, such as violence/beauty and spirituality/politics. Rapture is about the relationship between sex and spiritual and philosophical foundations of Islam, such as the male and female principles in the Sufi tradition: ‘The human nature contains the possibility of uniting the opposites, where the soul, the feminine principle, is united with the Spirit or Intellect, the masculine principle. Once the feminine principle reaches the spriritual stage of peace and it re-integrates with the masculine principle, it finally completes its journey and rests in certainty.’ In this installation filmed in Morocco, about a hundred women are standing on one side in a desert landscape, on the other are men in urban surroundings. The interaction takes place through music, movement and rituals.