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
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