Making eye contact: Lalla Essaydi's Powerful Photos on Exhibit at San Diego Museum of Art
The first thing you notice about Lalla Essaydi’s striking photographs is that many of the women are looking directly at you. We are used to seeing Arab women looking away, their faces often hidden by a veil.
They rarely invite eye contact.
But in Essaydi’s unsettling work — on exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art through Aug. 4 — they engage you directly, daring you to look. And not just look, but really see them.
Several of Essaydi’s photographs are scattered through the institution, and a grouping is on display in Gallery 20 upstairs at the museum. It’s a relatively small exhibit, but an undeniably powerful, even transformative one (more of her art can be found in the book “Lalla Essaydi: Crossing Boundaries Bridging Cultures”).
It’s hard to engage with Essaydi’s large-scale photographs without questioning your own cultural and gender stereotypes and biases. You wonder, who are these women? And who did you think they were?
You’ll soon discover you’re not the only one in dialogue with these images.
You can join the company of 19th-century artists like Delacroix and Inges whose “Orientalist” paintings objectified North African and Arab women as fantasy objects populating the exotic and forbidden world of the harem.
“Unfortunately, what they did is create a world that doesn’t exist, except in the mind of the people who don’t know the culture,” said Essaydi, who grew up in Morocco, lives in New York, and was in San Diego for the exhibition’s opening. “And the way they perceive us after that becomes problematic.”
That perception is particularly seductive as the Orientalist paintings are so beautiful.
“That makes them really dangerous,” said Essaydi. “Their beauty allows us to absorb and to appreciate women being sold as slaves, and women being naked — you know, all these troubling things.”
Essaydi’s photos are also undeniably beautiful, but she uses the Orientalist painters’ own conventions to undermine their assumptions.
A number of her sumptuous, elaborately constructed pieces are staged in a way that the poses resemble, and consequently, recontextualize this male fantasy world, whether her “Les Femmes du Maroc #1,” which is inspired by Delacroix’s “Les Femmes d’Alger,” or most strikingly, her triptych “La Grande Odalisque,” which overtly challenges Inges’ celebrated Orientalist painting of the same name.
As in nearly all of Essaydi’s work, “Odalisque” is teeming with Arabic script. You see it on the background, on the fabric covering the subject, even written in henna on her subject’s arms, back, face and feet. It’s Essaydi and her subject’s story, and even though it’s unreadable, it functions as a protective layer, shielding her from our potentially objectifying gaze but allowing her to look right at us.
And unlike Inges’ “Odalisque,” whose expression and naked body seem to signal ‘at your service,’ we are stymied by the assertiveness of Essaydi’s “Odalisque.”
Look if you dare. You may see, really see, her for the first time.
Source: www.sandiegouniontribune.com