Converging Territories #12
Artist
Lalla Essaydi
(b. 1956)
Date2003
MediumC-print
Dimensions40 x 50 in.
ClassificationsPhotograph
Credit LineCharles F. Smith Fund
Terms
Object number2006.125
DescriptionEssaydi speaks very clearly about her work: "The traditions of Islam exist within spatial boundaries. The presence of men defines public space, the streets, the meeting places. Women are confined to private spaces, the architecture of the homes. In these photographs, I am constraining women within space, confining them to their 'proper' place, a place bounded by walls and controlled by men. Their confinement is a decorative one. The women, then, become literal with this visual confinement, I recall literal confinements. The house in the photographs is a large, unoccupied house belonging to my extended family. When a young woman disobeyed, stepped outside the permissible space, she was sent to this house. Accompanied by servants, but spoken to by no one, she would spend a month alone. In this silence, women can only be confined visions of femininity. In photographing women inscribed with henna, I emphasize their decorative role, but subvert the silence of confinement. These women 'speak' visually to the house and to each other, creating a space that is both hierarchical and fluid. Furthermore, the calligraphic writing, a sacred Islamic art form, inaccessible to women, constitutes an act of rebellion."(1) In "Converging Territories #12"(pl.15) we enter awkwardly into a setting in which we are immediately destabilized by a contortion of dimensions-the flattening of space by continuous calligraphy and the flow of one woman's black hair, countered by the penetration of the heightened camera angle, whose intrusion is abruptly arrested by the other woman's gaze. Unaware of our presence, the first woman is caught by the camera in the act of writing; the second, fully aware, is smothered in text, as though her life were already written. The converging territories of Islam and the West, past and present, private and public, all conspire to complicate our reading of the image and speak to the confusions of women across the globe, including ourselves, in response to post-modern intersections of genders, cultures and representation.
S.B.
NOTES:
1. Lalla Essaydi, "Feminist Statement," Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base: Lalla Essaydi, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/feminist_art_base/gallery/lalla_esaydi.php, (accessed August 19, 2010).
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