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From the Arabian Nights to the Arab Spring, Westerners see images of the Middle East in our own pop culture, news and art.
But what does the region look like through the lens of local women?
The exhibit She Who Tells a Story includes 85 images taken from the 1990s to today by a dozen female photographers from Iran and the Arab world.
They aim to challenge Western conceptions and illuminate contemporary life and politics.
Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the exhibit opens at the Canadian War Museum Wednesday and runs until March 4.
We interviewed Kristen Gresh, who is the Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh curator of photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, via email.
Speechless, from the 1996 series Women of Allah by Iranian-born photographer Shirin Neshat is part of She Who Tells a Story, an exhibit of photographs taken by women photographers from Iran and the Arab world at the Canadian War Museum opening running until March 4.
The images in this exhibit range from works of fine art to photojournalism. What is the common thread?
Their images are about the people, landscapes, and cultures of a region in flux — one that cannot be defined in a singular territorial, religious, or ethnic way. Reflecting on the power of politics and the legacy of war, the photographs in this exhibition challenge Western notions about the “Orient,” examine the complexities of identity, and redefine documentary as a genre. With passion and power, the artists touch on the visible and the invisible, the permissible and the forbidden, the spoken and the silent, the prosaic and the horrific.
Bullets Revisited #3, a 2012 work by the Moroccan photographer Lalla Essaydi, is part of She Who Tells a Story, an exhibit of photographs taken by women photographers from Iran and the Arab world at the Canadian War Museum opening December 6 and running until March 4.
When you talk about deconstructing “Orientalism” — as Edward Said described it — what is it that the West is getting wrong about Iran and the Arab world as seen through the eyes of these photographers?
Historically, Orientalism refers to depictions by European or American artists of the East, including Middle Eastern, North African and Eastern cultures — often presenting the “Orient” as culturally inferior. The history of photography in the area has largely consisted of images created by outsiders, ranging from pyramids and sacred biblical sites to staged harem scenes and belly dancers. Coupled with myths and traditional tales like the “Persian” Queen Scheherazade and the “Arabian” Thousand and One Nights, misconceptions continue to persist to this day.
These stereotypes are shattered with Shirin Neshat’s groundbreaking series Women of Allah (1993-97). The series grew out of a visit she made to her native Iran 15 years after the Iranian Revolution (1979). On view are portraits from the series — each of which incorporate elements of the veil (or hijab), gun, text and gaze and break down Orientalist myths, showing women empowered in the face of opposition. Among the earliest photographs in the exhibition, they are overlaid with Persian script from contemporary Iranian women writers and evoke the role that women played in the Iranian Revolution. The series marked a turning point in the recent history of representation and debates about the veil, inspiring exploration by other photographers.
In addition to Neshat, others have had an impact on the history of visual representation and the perception of Orientalist stereotypes. Moroccan-born Lalla Essaydi, a former painter and alumnus of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), uses iconography from 19th century Orientalist paintings as inspiration to explore and question her own cultural identity. In the triptych Bullets Revisited #3 (2012), the most expansive work in the exhibition at 5 1/2 x 12 1/2 feet, she uses calligraphy (a typically male art form) to suggest the complexity of gender roles within Islamic culture. In Bullets Revisited #3, silver and golden bullet casings evoke symbolic violence, referencing her fear about growing restrictions on women in a new, post-revolutionary era that followed demonstrations and protests in the Arab world that began in 2010.
Is there one image you find most compelling? Why?
It is hard to choose one single image! Jananne Al-Ani and Gohar Dashti’s series both come to mind.
For example, from an airplane, Al-Ani captured sites in the Middle Eastern landscape, many of which are visible only when the sun is low in the sky. Such “shadow sites” reveal traces of natural and man-made activity below. Her film, Shadow Sites II, is made exclusively from high-resolution photographs that dissolve one into another while appearing to burrow into the earth. Al-Ani’s marriage of nature, flight and photographic technology references the history of military surveillance — from early 20th century aerial photography to more recent satellite imaging used during the 1991 Desert Storm campaign and the use of unmanned drones in the 2003 Gulf War. The revelation of latent images in the landscape brings to the surface Orientalist myths of the Middle Eastern landscape as an unoccupied desert.
As for the Today’s Life and War series, Dashti’s series consists of theatrical, staged photographs, in which a couple pursues ordinary activities in a fictionalized battlefield. They sit as newlyweds in the shell of a decorated abandoned car and on the ground at a makeshift traditional table celebrating the Persian New Year, Nowruz. As they perform their daily routines, they are interrupted by symbols of war — a looming tank, a missile head, a wall of sandbags. Dashti’s images offer powerful metaphors for the experience of war and collective cultural memories. Such symbolic acts as hanging flag-like white cloths on barbed wire are harsh reminders of war frontiers. Boundaries and barriers, both real and metaphorical, recur throughout and evoke the artist’s own history, growing up near the Iran-Iraq border while two countries were at war. The small hints of bright colours against muted backgrounds may indicate glimmers of hope in the midst of conflict.
Mother, Daughter, Doll, a series by the Yemen-born photographer Boushra Almutawakel, is part of She Who Tells a Story, an exhibit of photographs taken by women photographers from Iran and the Arab world at the Canadian War Museum opening December 6 and running until March 4.
Boushra Almutawakel’s photos seem timely with a Canadian province, Quebec, enacting a disputed ban on people wearing face coverings accessing some government services. In her Hijab/Veil Series, the woman and her daughter literally disappear from the frame after being photographed in increasingly conservative covering yet the photographer has said she doesn’t want to fuel Western stereotypes that women who wear hijab are “weak, oppressed, ignorant.” Why did you choose these photos and how do you interpret them?
I find her work to continue to be particularly relevant. She uses the veil to challenge social trends and explore the complexities of public appearance. Religious extremism, increasingly pervasive in her native Yemen, calls for the public concealment of women’s, and even girls’, bodies. Rather than denounce the headscarf (hijab), these staged portraits visually protest the covering of young women and the trend toward black, particularly the more extensive niqab. The fading smiles of mother and daughter correspond to the disappearance of their colourful clothing from one picture to the next. The series ends with an image of an empty pedestal draped in black fabric – mother, daughter and doll are completely eliminated, a statement about the erasure of the individual through dress.
—
This interview has been edited for length.
查看原文...
But what does the region look like through the lens of local women?
The exhibit She Who Tells a Story includes 85 images taken from the 1990s to today by a dozen female photographers from Iran and the Arab world.
They aim to challenge Western conceptions and illuminate contemporary life and politics.
Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the exhibit opens at the Canadian War Museum Wednesday and runs until March 4.
We interviewed Kristen Gresh, who is the Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh curator of photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, via email.
Speechless, from the 1996 series Women of Allah by Iranian-born photographer Shirin Neshat is part of She Who Tells a Story, an exhibit of photographs taken by women photographers from Iran and the Arab world at the Canadian War Museum opening running until March 4.
The images in this exhibit range from works of fine art to photojournalism. What is the common thread?
Their images are about the people, landscapes, and cultures of a region in flux — one that cannot be defined in a singular territorial, religious, or ethnic way. Reflecting on the power of politics and the legacy of war, the photographs in this exhibition challenge Western notions about the “Orient,” examine the complexities of identity, and redefine documentary as a genre. With passion and power, the artists touch on the visible and the invisible, the permissible and the forbidden, the spoken and the silent, the prosaic and the horrific.
Bullets Revisited #3, a 2012 work by the Moroccan photographer Lalla Essaydi, is part of She Who Tells a Story, an exhibit of photographs taken by women photographers from Iran and the Arab world at the Canadian War Museum opening December 6 and running until March 4.
When you talk about deconstructing “Orientalism” — as Edward Said described it — what is it that the West is getting wrong about Iran and the Arab world as seen through the eyes of these photographers?
Historically, Orientalism refers to depictions by European or American artists of the East, including Middle Eastern, North African and Eastern cultures — often presenting the “Orient” as culturally inferior. The history of photography in the area has largely consisted of images created by outsiders, ranging from pyramids and sacred biblical sites to staged harem scenes and belly dancers. Coupled with myths and traditional tales like the “Persian” Queen Scheherazade and the “Arabian” Thousand and One Nights, misconceptions continue to persist to this day.
These stereotypes are shattered with Shirin Neshat’s groundbreaking series Women of Allah (1993-97). The series grew out of a visit she made to her native Iran 15 years after the Iranian Revolution (1979). On view are portraits from the series — each of which incorporate elements of the veil (or hijab), gun, text and gaze and break down Orientalist myths, showing women empowered in the face of opposition. Among the earliest photographs in the exhibition, they are overlaid with Persian script from contemporary Iranian women writers and evoke the role that women played in the Iranian Revolution. The series marked a turning point in the recent history of representation and debates about the veil, inspiring exploration by other photographers.
In addition to Neshat, others have had an impact on the history of visual representation and the perception of Orientalist stereotypes. Moroccan-born Lalla Essaydi, a former painter and alumnus of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), uses iconography from 19th century Orientalist paintings as inspiration to explore and question her own cultural identity. In the triptych Bullets Revisited #3 (2012), the most expansive work in the exhibition at 5 1/2 x 12 1/2 feet, she uses calligraphy (a typically male art form) to suggest the complexity of gender roles within Islamic culture. In Bullets Revisited #3, silver and golden bullet casings evoke symbolic violence, referencing her fear about growing restrictions on women in a new, post-revolutionary era that followed demonstrations and protests in the Arab world that began in 2010.
Is there one image you find most compelling? Why?
It is hard to choose one single image! Jananne Al-Ani and Gohar Dashti’s series both come to mind.
For example, from an airplane, Al-Ani captured sites in the Middle Eastern landscape, many of which are visible only when the sun is low in the sky. Such “shadow sites” reveal traces of natural and man-made activity below. Her film, Shadow Sites II, is made exclusively from high-resolution photographs that dissolve one into another while appearing to burrow into the earth. Al-Ani’s marriage of nature, flight and photographic technology references the history of military surveillance — from early 20th century aerial photography to more recent satellite imaging used during the 1991 Desert Storm campaign and the use of unmanned drones in the 2003 Gulf War. The revelation of latent images in the landscape brings to the surface Orientalist myths of the Middle Eastern landscape as an unoccupied desert.
As for the Today’s Life and War series, Dashti’s series consists of theatrical, staged photographs, in which a couple pursues ordinary activities in a fictionalized battlefield. They sit as newlyweds in the shell of a decorated abandoned car and on the ground at a makeshift traditional table celebrating the Persian New Year, Nowruz. As they perform their daily routines, they are interrupted by symbols of war — a looming tank, a missile head, a wall of sandbags. Dashti’s images offer powerful metaphors for the experience of war and collective cultural memories. Such symbolic acts as hanging flag-like white cloths on barbed wire are harsh reminders of war frontiers. Boundaries and barriers, both real and metaphorical, recur throughout and evoke the artist’s own history, growing up near the Iran-Iraq border while two countries were at war. The small hints of bright colours against muted backgrounds may indicate glimmers of hope in the midst of conflict.
Mother, Daughter, Doll, a series by the Yemen-born photographer Boushra Almutawakel, is part of She Who Tells a Story, an exhibit of photographs taken by women photographers from Iran and the Arab world at the Canadian War Museum opening December 6 and running until March 4.
Boushra Almutawakel’s photos seem timely with a Canadian province, Quebec, enacting a disputed ban on people wearing face coverings accessing some government services. In her Hijab/Veil Series, the woman and her daughter literally disappear from the frame after being photographed in increasingly conservative covering yet the photographer has said she doesn’t want to fuel Western stereotypes that women who wear hijab are “weak, oppressed, ignorant.” Why did you choose these photos and how do you interpret them?
I find her work to continue to be particularly relevant. She uses the veil to challenge social trends and explore the complexities of public appearance. Religious extremism, increasingly pervasive in her native Yemen, calls for the public concealment of women’s, and even girls’, bodies. Rather than denounce the headscarf (hijab), these staged portraits visually protest the covering of young women and the trend toward black, particularly the more extensive niqab. The fading smiles of mother and daughter correspond to the disappearance of their colourful clothing from one picture to the next. The series ends with an image of an empty pedestal draped in black fabric – mother, daughter and doll are completely eliminated, a statement about the erasure of the individual through dress.
—
This interview has been edited for length.
查看原文...
