Lalla Essaydi s photographs

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1 PROFILE LALLA ESSAYDI Lalla Essaydi s photographs are multifaceted explorations of female identity in Islamic culture, inspired by her own personal history. Her childhood in Morocco was full of women. Her father had four wives, and her memories are of the solidarity and support between them. They were all our mothers. There were still jealousies and intrigues, but the solidarity between them was amazing. It was her father who first encouraged her talent. I had a wonderful relationship with him, she reminisces. He was a painter. I spent a lot of time with him, and he always provided me with colors and paints. To share something that you both love is amazing. Essaydi emigrated to the U.S. and studied art, photography, and video at the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, where she garnered an MFA. She has absorbed all of these into her work, which she likes to think of as photographic tableaux. Exploring her heritage through her art, for her first project, The Three Silences, Essaydi returned to Morocco, to a 16th-century house owned by her family. It was a place where she, as a child, had been sent by her family as punishment when she ventured outside the boundaries of conventional behavior. She journeyed back to this house of solitude and contemplation with her camera, full of questions about what it was to be Arab, woman, Muslim, in a society where confinement was a way of life. The house and architecture became her structure, her metaphor, her canvas. People were much more intrigued by the house and how beautiful it was, she says. I kept going back to try to find a way to remove the architecture. I decided to cover it with white cloth. She shrouded the women in white as well. She would invite friends and relatives to participate, and together they would spend weeks inside the house, co-existing. Most of the women are related to the home in the same way I was; and they had the same experience. We would re-enact what we had lived, and at the same time create new memories. The best way to really document this was to write it down. That is how my diary started. I think of all my work as a diary in a sense, and the women become the pages and the chapters in a book. Longfellow s poem The Three Silences speaks of the silence of speech, of desire, of thought. It is silence that Essaydi confronts in her work. I always dreamed of writing, she says. She chose henna, traditionally employed as body art by women. Essaydi took it a step further, painstakingly inscribing on the walls, the women s clothing, skin. This stream-of-consciousness writing was for her a subversive act, as the written word in Islamic culture has been the domain of men. She has given these women a voice. I was trying to write in a poetic way, because poetry is also considered high art and not available to women, Essaydi notes. This body of work became Converging Territories. Applying the henna for me is close to painting. That is what I enjoy about my work the process of learning and exploring. Universal is the word I would use for the text I am using, she says. If it were translated it would fit with any woman. Essaydi had studied Orientalist 19th-century painters such as Delacroix, Gérôme and Ingres, who portrayed Arab women as sexual objects nude in the boudoir, harem and slave market. I was always fascinated by these paintings because they are exquisite, she explains. However, I was troubled by the context and their message. I understood that it was a fantasy, but questioned that the fantasy is about me, about women I know; it s not right. The more I learned, the more it became necessary for me to do something about. It s my heritage. I could be that slave girl in one of these paintings. People are attracted to them because they are so beautiful. That makes the viewer accept the positions of these women being sold in marketplaces. That is not right, she says, that beauty should become so dangerous. Essaydi s response to this dangerous beauty was to create a dialogue across time, crossing yet another boundary. In Les Femmes du Maroc she mimics the poses of these paintings, transforming the concept of harem into a modernist statement of feminist solidarity. What I did was strip the paintings from all the beautiful trappings: the colors and everything that had created a situation where the women are being accepted. Essaydi s work has been widely exhibited around the world, and is held in both private and public collections, including the Louvre, the British National Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Art Institute of Chicago. Living in the U.S., she returns to Morocco often, and her current project takes her inside the harem area of a palace, where architecture once again plays a prominent role. Essaydi s oeuvre is indeed an embodiment of convergences of past and present, East and West, words and silence, image and idea. Shawn O Sullivan PRINT AND CONTACT INFORMATION Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, New York (212) ; ; L E S F E M M E S D U M A R O C # 2 6 A SELF-PORTRAIT BY LALLA ESSAYDI

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