Contemporary Iranian Art: Shadi Ghadirian

Photographer Shadi Ghadirian lives and works in Tehran. Her series of Qajar photographs, mimicking standards of 18th and 19th century Qajar court photography, is framed in "Veil" as a thoughtful and witty retort to ethnographic Orientalist portraits and in "Unveiled" as subversive art worthy of a second look.
Responses to her work vary. In an exhibition review, critic Olivia Hampton writes, “Qajar is a recreation of the photographic compositions and styles of the studio portraits that flourished in the Qajar dynasty, who ruled Iran from 1794-1925... But clear intrusions of modernity surface in the work, in the form of ghetto blasters and television sets.” Here we see a European art critic reading the work to be about modernity, and an “intrusion” into an idealized and Orientalized past. In a similar vein, “Unveiled” curator Lisa Farjam writes, “Ghadirian, who is influenced by Qajar traditions in Iranian photohistory, does not bow to the standard image of the darkly-clad Muslim woman; these veils are full of color and life.” Here, Ghadirian is presented as drawing from a traditional and Islamic past while infusing a modernity and vibrance. Farjam frames Ghadirian as breaking stereotypes of “the Muslim woman,” whose form, voice, and sexuality are cloaked and disappear with the veil.


To counter these views, fellow artist Jananne Al-Ani intervenes to clarify multiple readings by varied audiences, rather than assuming a homogenous and Western audience. She notes, “For an Iranian audience, the contemporary props are seen as ordinary objects in an extraordinary costume drama, whereas for a Western audience – with no knowledge of the history of Iranian dress – the contemporary props disrupt what appears to be a timeless ethnographic portrait of an Other culture.” Here, Al-Ani broadens the debate and the discussion of the work to include multiple perspectives, rather than presuming the work’s audience(s) will be culturally homogenous. Moore writes that Ghadirian's inclusion of Western electronics "raise pointed questions about the provenance of commodity culture and the different forms of fetishism that impact upon women transnationally.” Moore thus creates a productive channel into discussing how women’s bodies in representation have been historically used across many cultures for varying reasons.

This call to a broader audience and shared commonalities reappears in Ghadirian’s more recent work, the “Like EveryDay” series, which highlights the quotidian nature of many women’s lives and the roles they perform. Ghadirian’s gallery labels the series, which was featured in the “Unveiled” exhibition, as “depicting anonymous chador-wrapped figures with kitchen utensils instead of faces. This simple, ominous collision of potent symbols – the veil and domesticity –parodies stereotypical understanding of women of the region and universally.” Most viewers imagine the veiled figures to be human, and Muslim women, given that resemblance to variations of the Islamic veil, but there are no discernible people in these photographs.


The immediate association for Western audiences is the equating of women as tools, implements, and as invisible as the household items of daily use; women are reduced to sexual tools in wearing the veil, could be an interpretation. In the photographs, there is no trace of a person visible except for one figure in a gingham flowered veil with a strainer over her face; here, the viewer can see traces of skin, a nose, and the tip of a finger, presumed to be feminine by the veil. Otherwise, the series portrays tools and veils, but not people.


Ghadirian works within Iranian political constraints, despite the potentially difficult interpretations of some of her works. According to Iranian law, “All images of women in Iran must be shown in hijab and instead of trying to escape this or seeing it as a constraint, Shadi Ghadirian has made it her theme as she continues to investigate the condition of women in her home country.” Much as Sedira pushes viewers to interpret, hold, and gather multiple viewpoints at once, Ghadirian works within and through her sociopolitical situation to create works that challenge easy assumptions and classification.

Contemporary Arab Art: Zineb Sedira

Silent Sight, 2001 from zsedira on Vimeo.

ZINEB SEDIRA
Lately I’ve been working on a number of academic projects in addition to my job, and that has kept me from updating the blog. Rather than remain radio silent, I thought I’d share a snippet of the presentation I’ve been working on for the Middle Eastern Studies Association conference, which focuses on representations of the veil in contemporary art from the Middle East.

The photography and video installations of Zineb Sedira often focus on identity politics. Sedira has used her work to explore questions of belonging and ancestry; she was born in France to Algerian parents, and later moved to Britain. Her earlier work tended more toward the autobiographical, examining family dynamics, with more recent work focusing on the geographies and landscapes of identity politics. Silent Sight, 2000, is a video installation where the camera brackets a woman’s eyes, and a thin wisp of the Algerian haik (veil), so that they inhabit the entire field of view. The woman’s eyes blink, and look to the left and right, towards the frame of the white haik; the viewer immediately focuses on the woman’s eyes and the haik blends into the background. As “Veil” curators Bailey and Tawadros remark, “Here it is the woman’s gaze and the control of her own gaze that takes precedence, while the veil dissolves into a white haze.” Thus, the veil becomes invisible, not a hindrance or restriction upon the woman, and exists as one chosen element of a multifaceted identity as the viewers examine body language. Here the veil doesn’t cover but instead clarifies and focuses attention on the body (at least parts of it); and this focus is not directed to a gender-specific anatomy. The audio accompaniment to the video recounts this experience of limited visibility due to the veil from another perspective; the narrator, as a child, “struggling to interpret her mother’s feelings from beneath her haik. The spectator, who only has access to Sedira’s voice and eyes, is encouraged to replicate the process of establishing trust within a limited visual field.” The narrator recounts an experience from childhood when she failed to recognize her mother because the haik obscured her mother beyond recognition. Here the audio and the video reveal two separate and distinct subjectivities: critic Rachel Epp Buller describes, “The soundtrack plays on the emotion of this moment: sometimes Sedira’s voice shakes, or becomes strained or unclear...This random rhythm – eyes opening, blinking, then closing – matches the moments of silence and speech, white it is the gaze, fixed or lowered, that keeps us in the time frame of the video and in the present tense of its duration.” The narrator comments that she finally accepted the veil was her mother’s “home,” invoking images of domesticity and an almost Victorian “angel-in-the-house” perspective. Instead of unilaterally supporting this assertion, however, the young daughter’s inability to connect to her mother because of the veil could be read as the veil preventing feminine roles (that of motherhood) while simultaneously playing into them (socially respectable veiled woman). Critically, however, the important intervention made here is to reconcile two potentially opposing viewpoints (for and against the veil). The veil is not a symbol of feminine submission, or a backwards, “uncivilized” woman; it does not render a woman invisible, but acutely visible. In a single physical experience, the viewer’s senses recount different stories: the audio portion gently presents a story of frustration, difficulty and isolation in a relationship because of the veil whereas the visual portion affirms the agency and power that veiling can afford. The viewer’s senses are split and yet dually embodied.

Sedira also explores the veil, and the question of anonymity and visibility, again in her photographic installation Don’t Do To Her What You Did To Me, No. 2, 1996 (above). This series of photographs shows Sedira in varied stages of veiling and unveiling, thus making the act of veiling visible and demystified, stripping it of mystery. Epp Buller further comments, “Using herself as the photographic subject, Sedira asserts through her series the individual identities of women despite their veils, which in turn combats Western mythologies about veiled women. As the artist herself asserts, ‘The unveiled woman is seen as an individual and civilized subject, a far cry from the over-represented and culturally constructed veiled woman, who is considered anonymous, passive, and exotic.’” In this installation, Sedira shows a woman in various states of veiling, performing multiple identities simultaneously, and thus breaking the dichotomy. Sedira has developed the metaphor of “veiling-the-mind” as she produced work questioning and probing the veil. This metaphor, she writes, explains “the (mis)reading of cultural signs; to counteract the Western view of veiling, I try not to resort to the literal veil in my artistic practice. Instead I refer to veiling-the-mind in order to explore the multiple forms of veiling in both Western and Muslim cultures.” Sedira uses her work as a space to explore and expand the definition of the veil, rendering it more catholic and philosophical and moving it to a mental, rather than physical, plane.

Sedira also plays on the veil in another religious background. Sedira photographs herself wearing a haik in her Self-Portraits or the Virgin Mary series, 2000 (above). The title of the work blurs the Algerian haik with Christian veils, calling attention to the historic similarities in veiling practices between Christianity and Islam; it also highlights the sexualized nature of women’s bodies as religious saints, and perhaps alluding to the way women artists are similarly singled out for their gender. In this series, the veiled woman is visible, but barely; the photographs contain little contrast between the background the subject, the whiteness at once suggesting an ethereal invisibility, transparency, but also absence. Thus, Sedira employs a color that is the sum of all colors, with no discernible competition between different strains of light, hinting towards a synthesized, pluralistic approach; simultaneously, white references a disturbing colonial history and is evocative of absence, loss and invisibility.
Commenting on her own work, Sedira writes, “At first sight, my artistic practice refers to the veil as a visual motif. But the veil is never purely a physical code, delineated and present; it is also a transparent and subtle mental code.” Here Sedira encourages the viewer to think of the veil as a subjective mental idea, unique to each wearer. She also notes in her catalog essay for “Veil:”

“The visual art in “Veil” has many readings, but I wish to foreground that of transgression. All the artists in this project communicate the personal and the collective, with photography, video, words, installations, and sound as their media of expression and inscription. My ambition for such a dialogue was, and still remains, the need for a critique that enables a renewed lexicon with which to articulate the complexities and subtleties - the ambiguities and contradictions, the generalities and specificities, the similarities and differences - of veiling...such a lexicon could then speak to and about the paradoxes of the veil.”

Sedira’s work transgresses stereotypes, shattering binaries by weaving them into rich tapestries of plurality and simultaneity. While her work references common assumptions and stereotypes, she toys with them to challenge them rather than submitting to them. Furthermore, Sedira’s work does not play into easy tropes of East/West distinctions. Her work has drawn on loaded imagery of the veil and women in domestic capacities, but the messages underpinning their presentations are complicating rather than essentializing.
-Elizabeth Harrington, 2010


(La maison de ma mere, 2002, above)

For other thoughts on Sedira:
http://homepage.mac.com/kmcspadden/IStudy.html

http://libcom.org/library/documentary-representations-british-european-muslim-women-essay-review

On Women & the American Media

Recently I watched the Superbowl. I have long believed that American advertising and media is terribly hostile to women, portraying them consistently as the housekeepers and stay-at-home moms (have you ever seen a Lysol or Johnson&Johnson ad featuring a stay-at-home dad using cleaning wipes, brooms, or washing dishes?).

The ads during the Superbowl were more of the same, but with a sharpness I wasn't expecting. Especially for the largest televised event in America, and seen by millions and millions of Americans. You'd think these major companies would realize that women not only enjoy sports too, but are watching, taking note, and still constituting 52% of the consumer base in this country.

A Bridgestone ad shows a band of bandits on a dark road that stop a car, and the bandits shout, "Your tires or your life." A few seconds later, a woman is shoved out of the car. Disappointed, the bandits yell, "I said your life, not your wife!" as the car screeches away. Women aren't worth a set of tires here.

A Dodge ad portrays headshots of silent, straight-faced men while a narrator announces, "I will get up at 6am. I will be at work by 8:30am. I will walk the dog. I will say yes when you want me to. I will rinse my shaving particles from the sink. I will carry your lip balm." As if it is beyond reasonable to ask a man to work for a living (after all, we have to as well) and earn their keep, or clean up after himself, or occasionally request a favor. It's all these ridiculous demands women make.

Another ad, for FloTV, shows a man being dragged around a mall by his woman. She makes him stand in the bra section, and the narrator announces, "Girlfriend won't let you watch the Superbowl? Take off the skirt, man." The narrator then exhorts him to get FloTV, a mini portable tv, so he can constantly be around his sports. Here again, women are the burden, women make life hell...

These make me angry, because these images are subtle and rude and demeaning and are being broadcast to a younger generation that will imbibe them without questioning. My feminist anger is full and furious.

But my partner (a man) reminded me of something key. He said, "You know, these ads make me mad too. They don't portray a good image of men either: that we're all lugs who just are pretty dumb, watch sports, and can't get ourselves together."

Ya know, the man's got a point.