The single channel film 'Sarah' is the third film in a trilogy of film installations titled Dreamers which explore the world of women’s dreams. According to Neshat, Sarah is “about the unfolding journey of a woman as she recollects and breathes annihilation, as she faces residues of destruction, violence, genocide, and mortality in a state of dream. Sarah’s anxieties and fears at last force her to plunge into imagining her own death.” While not restricted to any particular time or place, the work is intended to reference a collective sense of anxiety and fear, part of the global experience in a world fraught with conflict.

Neshat says: “In my opinion, rational interpretations of dreams never seem to properly capture their true meanings and significance within human psyche. So Sarah is an effort to make sense of the more subliminal emotional and psychic universe that lives deep inside of us, but are difficult to explain through words.

“I have been haunted by the power of dreams for years” says Neshat, “I am fascinated by how in a state of dream, the boundaries in between madness and sanity, reality and fiction, conscious and subconscious are blurred and broken”. Dreamers, her 2016 solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, was based on aspects of the artist’s own dreams and featured Roja and Sarah, the second and third films in a trilogy of film installations, which began with Illusions and Mirrors in 2013. Roja’s character and dilemma in many ways resembles hers: the fear of the ‘stranger’ and the ‘strange land,’ and desire for a reunion with ‘home’ with ‘mother,’ with the ‘motherland’ that seems welcoming at first but becomes terrifying and demonic in the end. Themes of ‘flight’ and ‘levitation’, implying freedom and ecstasy, is a significant aspect of the Roja video that is a recurring theme in Neshat’s work.

The single channel film Roja is part of a trilogy of film installations titled Dreamers which explore the world of women’s dreams. Conceptually the video installation revolves around a single female protagonist whose emotional and psychological narrative remain on the border of dream and reality; madness and sanity; and consciousness and sub-consciousness as she faces her own distinct inner anxieties. “I have been haunted by the power of dreams for years” says Neshat, “I am fascinated by how in a state of dream, the boundaries in between madness and sanity, reality and fiction, conscious and subconscious are blurred and broken” (2016). Dreamers is based on aspects of the artists own dreams. Roja’s character and dilemma in many ways resembles hers: the fear of the ‘stranger’ and the ‘strange land,’ and desire for a reunion with ‘home’ with ‘mother,’ with the ‘motherland’ that seems welcoming at first but becomes terrifying and demonic in the end.