Shirin Neshat

In “Land of Dreams,” an expansive and transporting exhibition at the Gladstone gallery, the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, who lives in New York, ventures into new territory: the American West. The diverse people and starkly majestic landscape of New Mexico are the subjects of an installation of some hundred black-and-white portraits (a detail is pictured above) and a melancholic, surreal two-part film. The elegant photographs—whose backgrounds include accounts of the sitters’ dreams, handwritten by Neshat in Farsi—loosely establish the film’s narrative thread. Its main character, Simin, is an Iranian art student (played by the actress Sheila Vand, in a role that suggests Neshat’s alter ego) who has undertaken a dream-recording documentary project, with a twist. She is also a spy, one of a network of archivists who work in a vast mountain bunker. Simin is a psychic interloper, too: she appears inside the dreams that she records. Neshat uses this eerie story and the similarity of the American and Iranian desert terrain to draw unlikely connections between disparate people, imagining a tenuous bridge across geographical, political, and metaphysical divides. (Gladstone; Jan. 19-Feb. 27.)