Visual artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat premieres a new film trilogy this May, concurrent with the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Ilaria Bernardi and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, organized by Associazione Genesi (founded by Letizia Moratti in 2020) and Banca Ifis, and presented by Gladstone Gallery and Lia Rumma Gallery. Inspired by Neshat’s fascination with the tragic story of Nasim Aghdam, an Iranian-born media personality whose life and artistic practice resonated with Neshat, Do U Dare! explores one artist’s gaze upon another, and the connections that emerge between them. Shot in three different socioeconomic landscapes in New York, the three films investigate the paradox between women’s inner and outer worlds, reality and illusion, and American society and the Iranian female perspective. Do U Dare! is on view at the Palazzo Marin from May 8 through September 6, 2026.

This trilogy was inspired by the story of Nasim Aghdam, an Iranian woman who due to her Bahá’í faith, fled to the U.S. when she was a child to escape persecution by the Iranian government. Living in suburban California, isolated and struggling to connect with American society while also losing her connection to her Iranian heritage, Aghdam built her own imaginative world online where she performed, sang, and danced in stylized videos that spoke to her longing, rage, and a need to be seen. She embodied and subverted the universal image of women as objects of desire and control through her provocative and unsettling videos that confronted and mocked her viewers’ expectations. Her videos went viral, gathering millions of views until YouTube suddenly shut down her channel. Devastated by authoritarian censorship akin to that which her family experienced in Iran, in 2018 at the age of 38, Aghdam entered YouTube’s headquarters armed, injured several people, and ultimately took her own life.

Examining Aghdam’s artistic and life journey, Neshat found that Aghdam’s isolation and artistic yearning mirrored her own story of exile, ambition, and displacement, as she too had left Iran at 17 for Southern California. Both women carried emotional wounds—nostalgia for their homeland, loneliness, and the psychic fracture of being caught between two worlds—and turned to creative practice as an act of resistance and a way to cope with their circumstances and to forge a new identity. Neshat’s empathetic exploration of a once peace-advocating Aghdam’s turn to violence inspired the emotional and artistic core of Do U Dare!