i/you

self/other

male/female

west/east

white/black

subject/object

mind/body

progress/stasis

colonizer/colonized

international/national

national/local

inclusion/exclusion

pure/impure

time/timeless

location/dislocation

center/margin

placement/displacement

presence/absence

inside/outside

veiled/unveiled

fixity/fluidity

sameness/difference

permanence/change

From the Opening Chapter of Contemporary Arab Women’s Art , Fran Lloyd, editor.

“A restitution of body. Bodies of new women…A loud voice that gives body. Body and new forms restoring a darker, deeper texture to other…voices.”

Assia Djebar

As Shirin Neshat, an Iranian expatriated artist, recently noted, “we have been struck by how the female body has been politicized and has functioned in a way as a type of battleground for ideological, philosophical and religious debates and agendas. Muslim women have been made to embody and practice the value systems of their societies through their bodies and social behavior.” However, she continues on, “at the same time, this phenomenon has given the women tremendous power to manipulate their bodies and treat them as a tool to support, protest, subvert or at times to transform the patriarchal rules of their societies.” 1 Indeed, the corporeal woman as a location for discussions of cultural definitions of gender roles, sexuality, and religiosity has reigned supreme in the Islamic world, perhaps ever since the Imam Ali ‘ibn Abu Taleb, the founder of the Shi’ite sect of Islam and the husband of the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, proclaimed in the Seventh century, “Almighty God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.” Fourteen centuries later, women’s bodies continue to be the subject of global geopolitics and a major rallying cry in the so-called “clash of civilizations.” In recent decades, however, the voices of Middle Eastern women have prevailed over the fray, finally allowed to have their turn in front of the global microphone.

Feminism in the Middle East, while perceived to be a new phenomenon to many in the West, in fact shares a long-standing presence in Arab and Islamic society. However, thanks in part to technological and globalization mechanisms, a third wave seems to have surged forth in the last ten years. One of the primary venues in which this has been spotlighted is the international art scene. The intersection of art and feminism has become a major focus for critical awareness and discussion by artists from both East and West; however, there exists crucial differences in the approach to the definition of feminism that deserve exploration.

The doctrine of Western feminism, while always evolving, essentially advocates a challenge of cultural norms impressed upon women as well as the subversion and deconstruction of those forces which attempt to control their minds and bodies. American women artists in the last half century, such as Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, and Cindy Sherman wholly embraced these calls to action. Such goals are no different for “Arab” and “Islamic” feminists, although there exist a great number more issues that influence these women’s choices and outlook. Indeed, the term “Arab feminism” (notably different from and yet related to “Islamic feminism”) is a source of great debate among contemporary scholars and activists, although their arguments became particularly contentious during the Middle East’s second wave of feminism in the late 1960’s through the 1980’s. The residual confusion caused by the divisions within the feminist intellectual and activist community is still, in fact, present; Margot Badran offers a simplified summary of the various factions and their significance within the larger feminist context:

Among a number of intellectual women across the ideological spectrum, one detects a kind of "feminism" or public activist mode without a name. This activism transcends ideological boundaries of politically articulated feminism and Islamism. I shall refer to it as gender activism. It is a response by women deciding for themselves how to conduct their lives in society. Thus many women whom I shall refer to…as feminist, pro-feminist, and Islamist women, are taking similar positions on women's societal roles and engaging in common forms of activism. In periodizing Egyptian women's activism, I call this the third wave of feminism and Islamism. …[it] constitutes a new configuration of female forces and has collapsed some of the hard-drawn lines that emerged during the second wave. …The term gender activism intends to capture women's common "feminist" modes of thinking and behavior in the public sphere without denying the reality of distinct femnist and Islamist "movements" and the separate experience of uncommitted (profeminist) women. 2

Moreover, as the term “feminist” has not been entirely embraced by the communities of Arab 3 women artists (given its ambiguous connotations), one cannot explicitly define all women’s artistic work in such simplified terms. Much of the work produced by these artists reveals a discernable desire to re/construct the personal history, cultural identity, and gender stereotypes of the Arab woman individual by individual, without any pre-determined impositions or definitions.

The additional binary presence of “The West” cannot be ignored as a factor in this process, either. Many women, while challenging their own cultures’ definitions of femininity, piety, and sexuality, express the desire to challenge the historical Orientalist gaze, which has for centuries obscured the conceptions of Arab women held by both Western audiences as well as Arab women themselves. Indeed, much of the development of the modern Arab art scene in the last century stemmed from the rejection of Orientalism’s aesthetic and thematic influences upon the artists of the region; such a reaction is most vividly evident in the work of Arab women artists, who, with the assistance of government sponsorship, have established a vibrant artistic networking community throughout both the Middle East as well as the international art world. Their empowerment is unique, in that not only did these women face the prospect of altering the status quo of patriarchal aesthetics and condescension, as Western feminist artists did, but they also had to challenge both the religious orthodoxy and the restraints of conservative social mores. Indeed, they have instigated a movement among artists of the Arab and Muslim worlds that is wholly unique, diverse, and at the forefront of both artistic innovation and geopolitical relevance.

Two artists who explicitly address the issues of corporeal reclamation, Shirin Neshat and Zineb Sedira, both employ photography and video installation as a means of challenging the usurpation of the Arab/Muslim woman’s body. Neshat, an Iranian artist now living and working in New York City, candidly questions gender stereotypes, both from within an Iranian cultural context as well as through Western perceptions of the veiled Muslim woman, in two different series, the first a photographic collection entitled Women of Allah , the second a film trilogy which includes Turbulence , Rapture , and Fervor . Similarly, Sedira, born to Algerian immigrant parents and raised in the suburbs of Paris, is motivated to express the experience of social control of women and their bodies through both the physical veil as well as what the artist calls the “veiling of the mind.”

Although she is an Iranian, and thus technically of Persian descent, Shirin Neshat has nonetheless proven herself to be a major force in propelling contemporary Arab women artists into the international spotlight. Born in 1957 in Qazvin, Iran, Neshat left her home in 1974 to study art in the United States. Her expatriate status became somewhat more permanent, however, after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. When she returned briefly in 1990, for the first of several subsequent revisits, she found a country wholly unlike the place she remembered: “There seemed to be very little color. Everyone was black or white… People had also changed on a very deep level, beyond even their own recognition. This whole shift of the Persian identity toward a more Islamic one created a kind of crisis." 4 She has since attempted to portray this struggle between dueling interpretations of faith, femininity, sexuality, and the self in her work, through the mediums of photography and video installation. Her first major artistic answer to these questions came in the series Women of Allah (1993-1997), a collection of black and white photographic self-portraits in which she depicts herself as a Muslim woman wearing a chador 5 . A glimpse at one print, Allegiance with Wakefulness (figure 1), alerts the audience of the forcefulness of Neshat’s response to this aforementioned ‘crisis’. A seemingly simple black and white photograph shows her feet, pointed upright so that her soles face the viewer in the central foreground. There is a sense of intimacy, softness, and vulnerability in the image, expressed through the exposure of the bare soles of her feet as well as the rounded shapes of her toes and the blurred background. However, these characteristics disarm the viewer, who is unprepared to confront the sleek and yet somehow serpentine barrel of a gun, which subtly emerges from in between the balls of her feet. It points not directly out at the audience, but off to the left, as if it was being aimed at another person to the viewer’s right side. Neshat covered the printed surface of her feet with calligraphy; drawn in black ink and written in Farsi, its presence merely enhances the eerie gravity of the image, as the darkness of the text dramatically contrasts with the paleness of her soles.

Throughout the Women of Allah series, Neshat borrowed fragments of poetry or religious texts and transposed them onto the surfaces of her photographs, completing a process that Hamid Dabashi describes as one in which “enduring assumptions of what constitutes an ‘Islamic woman’ are at once domestic to that culture and colonially crafted on it…targeting both of these divergent yet colliding agents.” 6 The poetic verses are mostly attributed to the famous Iranian feminist/poetess Forugh Farrokhzad, who writes of the experiences of Iranian women; the religious works she employs deal with the longing of Iranian women to join the Islamic Revolution. 7 However, for most of Neshat’s audience, the text is inaccessible, as Neshat does not provide translations of the poetry along side the work.

It is as though Neshat, with these photographs, is staking her own claim, on her own terms, to the control of her body. By grafting native and feminine text onto the image of her feet, a sensual, vulnerable, and erotic place, she creates a shield that protects her from the projections of the viewer, male, Western, or otherwise. She is thus able to regain control of her sexuality, define the parameters with which she is to be understood with text, and defend her self-reclamation with the aid of a gun.

The aesthetic juxtaposition of black and white strengthens Neshat’s imagery while at the same time creates a dizzying thematic greyness. The powerful confluence of so many opposing forces within a single frame disarms the viewer; as Igor Zabel notes, “Repression, fatalism, and passivity, social marginalization, veiled erotic promise, inspiration, heroism, mercilessness, and danger converge in a single female figure dressed in a chador.” 8 This turbulent intersection located on the site of her body allows Neshat the opportunity to take advantage of the viewer’s unease and recapture control of herself. The size of this photograph, roughly four feet tall, contributes to its confrontational quality -- its seriousness is silencing; the power of this photograph is inherent. .

Another photograph from the series, Speechless (figure 2), builds upon both these collisions of domesticity and foreign-ness. In it, an adolescent girl, with a melancholy that could be festering revolt in her eyes, stares dead ahead at the viewer, her head framed by the sweep of her black chador . Her face, although at first appearing to be grainy, is in fact covered in minute transcripts of poetic and religious verse; and, as in Allegiance with Wakefulness , a silver revolver creeps out from underneath her head covering, revealing a shiny nose located frighteningly close to her face. Instead of an indirect interaction with the gun, however, the barrel is aimed flatly out at the audience; its glittering cold steel mouth is resolute, much like the eyes of the girl. Neshat is now taking direct aim at the lens of the West, and of the male; the grave silence she provokes – and demands, as the title suggests – forces the audience to accept her authority without contest. The imagery speaks for itself while simultaneously rendering the viewer speechless. That the text is transcribed directly on her exposed face signifies her confrontation of Iranian Shi’a social mores; however, she turns the custom of veiling a woman’s face by covering and cloaking herself in the revolutionary message. Neshat said of these powerful images,

I made an attempt to analyze the concept of martyrdom in relation to the female body as it encountered politics, spirituality, violence and ultimately death during the Islamic revolution. We were faced with images of a female warrior, seemingly defiant and empowered, as she stood in submission and offered her human life to God and the cause of Islamic revolution; yet on another glance, she remained vulnerable, feminine and even erotic as she laid her gaze on the viewer. Here the female body seemed to become a canvas for a peculiar intersection between sexuality, politics and violence. 9

Neshat appears as this female warrior in a third photograph from the Women of Allah series, Rebellious Silence (figure 3). Standing against a simple, white background, she stands, with hair, neck, shoulders and chest covered by her chador , bolt upright, as if she was a soldier; the long, cold, thin barrel of a rifle rises vertically before her in her grasp, its nose brushing the top of her forehead. Her face is covered in large text which is broken up by the rifle’s shaft, dividing her face into two equal halves as it passes through the center point of her mouth, nose, and eyes. She appears resolute and focused but calm, her eyes suggesting a flicker of both sincerity and vulnerability. When asked to explain the reason for the presence of the gun in all the images from this series, Neshat replied:

It very much deals with that idea of martyrdom, which can be identified as terrorism. I'm trying to present this paradox where a typical martyr stands on the border of love of God and devotion and faith on one hand and crime and cruelty and violence on the other ... They're willing to commit a crime because they love God. That is such a strange ideology and that can only be understood from the Islamic perspective if you look at their history ... the obsession with death and a rejection of the material world. You live your whole life to promote Islam and when you die you get rewarded. So you're congratulated for your death, which is a very bizarre mentality. 10

The conflict she describes – between life and death, faith and infidelity, revolution and passivity – seem to swarm around the body of this woman, who, in her longing to fight in the Revolutionary Army, is considering the implementation of her own physical self as a weapon with which political and religious wars can be fought. Perhaps this is a reaction against the historical usage of women’s bodies as a causation of war, and not an element of it; or, perhaps Neshat merely wants to disseminate the image of a tough, powerful Muslim woman in order to dispel the Western idea that Muslim women are delicate, subjugated, and available for eroticization.

The concurrence of being muted and empowered as an individual by the presence of a gun is intrinsically related to Neshat’s critique of Iranian society under Islamic rule. Responding to questions of her motivation, Neshat said,

I'm interested in juxtaposing the traditional with the modern, but there are other more philosophical aspects that interest me as well - the desire of all human beings to be free, to escape conditioning, be it social, cultural, or political, and how we're trapped by all kinds of iconographies and social codes. I try to combine these elements to convey a sense of human crisis and emotion. One feels surrounded by these kinds of pressures in the Islamic culture. 11

Her guns are aimed at those who oppress passion, emotion, natural human responses, which, in her opinion, has occurred in Iran since the Revolution happened in 1979. After completing work on the Women of Allah series, Neshat took up the emotional control the theocracy wields over its populace in a trilogy of video installations: Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999), and Fervor (2000) 12 . All three works deal with the separation of men and women and its gendering impact upon Iranian society, although Neshat approaches the topic in each film in a slightly different manner. In Turbulent and Rapture , she employs the use of opposites to signify the divisions between the sexes. She commented, “in Turbulent the concept was centered on gender in relation to music and women’s absence from the experience of performing music in Iran. I presented the idea of “opposites” visually, spatially, and sonically…in Rapture , the premise of the piece was men and women’s distinct nature in response to sociopolitical pressure; I presented this contrast through new sets of “opposite” elements including nature/culture, rebellion/conformity, and predictable/non-predictable.” 13 In Fervor , (figures 4 through 8) however, she chose to portray the juxtaposition from an emotional, psychological, almost subconscious perspective, relying on what she calls the “commonality” of “the notion of ‘taboo’ in relation to the sexuality and romantic love in Islamic societies”, which is “equally shared by men and women, although it is often women who are sanctioned.” 14 In this film, which displays men and women on adjoining screens (instead of on ones facing each other, as was the case in Turbulent and Rapture ) a man and a woman pass each other in an empty intersection, sharing an intense glimpse at one another before parting ways. They meet again accidentally at a meeting hall, divided down the middle by an opaque black curtain into men’s and women’s sides, to hear the weekly sermon, which, coincidentally, addresses fighting temptation and lust. They sense each other’s presence through the curtain, delighting in their interaction until the woman can no longer ignore the message of the preacher, and hurries out of the hall in shame. At the end of the film, they come across each other in an intersection yet again, but they do not even look at each other, their cultural taboos firmly ingrained into their hearts and consciousnesses. 15 Explaining her dissection of taboos, Neshat wrote,

[they] are forms of culturally internalized inhibitions that by their very nature justify and allow for a sociopolitical structure to opeate on a deep emotional level, which reaffirms them through conformity. In Islamic societies, such taboos inhibit contact between the sexes in public space: for instance, a simple gaze is considered a “sin” in such a way that violations of this code create anxiety and would not be tolerated. Men and women face an internal and external pressure to suppress any sexual excitement in the social sphere. Surprisingly, however, this type of control actually heightens the level of sexual attraction in light of the deep sense of guilt and shame that one experiences in public. 16

Neshat’ shift away from the photographic medium towards a cinematic approach may also reflect the artist’s rejection of the colonialist, Western gaze. The origins of the studio art tradition in the Middle East lie in the European colonial interactions and imposition on the region in the nineteenth century; moreover, the introduction of the photographic lens, employed by Western visitors to the region during this time, perpetuated and increased the eroticization and subjugation of the Middle East, especially its women. Thus, her initial use of the photograph can be interpreted as the artist’s attempt to reconcile and reclaim the power of the lens from the Western eye; and her consequential shift towards cinematography can be seen as a rejection of that historical tool of conquest in favor of a medium less tainted with bias.

Similarly, Neshat’s employ of the veil, while natural within the context of her reference points, brings up the question of its use as a political tool, one easily manipulated by both East and West to suit particular ideological aims, and its implications for identity and the fundamental meaning of the artist’s work – for they are all fundamentally related to subjectivity. While her art dwells in juxtapositions, its ambiguity – be it emotional, thematical, or simply the gray liminal space in between the extremes – is the essence of what she is trying to achieve. “One element that's very important in the work…[it is] the duality that exists between the self, which is me, and what runs through me as a person, as a woman, as an immigrant and all of the personal anxieties that I have, and then the larger issues, that are about everyone. So for me it's always about how to navigate between the private and personal and the public, and the rational versus the irrational." 17 Moreover, as Holly Willis wrote,

“Neshat's interest in the chador embodies some of the conflicts at the heart of this instability -- at times, the garment has been a sign of subjugation; at others, it has been a sign of resistance. And for Neshat, who admits that, as an artist she loves the sculptural form of the black fabric encasing the body, the chador also references all the ambiguities and complexities, both personal and political, at the heart of subjectivity.”

Neshat’s deft navigation of these polarities on her body-as-canvas, weaving a complex and narrative through passion and reason and individual and society, offers rich insight into a world of greyness that is anything but monochromatic, allowing both artist and audience to challenge their own definitions of self and other.

While Neshat welcomes the ambiguities of the veil, Zineb Sedira struggles more openly with its complexities, challenging them more directly as subject matter, but presenting them aesthetically as ethereal and abstract. Concerned with the concept of “the veiling of the mind”, Sedira frequently uses the hijab – if not physically, then conceptually – as a primary subject in her photographic and video installations series in order to deconstruct its power, meanings and associations. Explaining the concept of the veiling of the mind, Sedira said, “it is a metaphor for censorship and self-censorship and permeates through all my work… I never had to wear the physical veil, but I definitely wore the mental veil.” 18 Indeed, as Fran Lloyd has noted, the veil has become an increasingly prominent symbol in both the East and West as a tool of repression and as a “external sign of racial and gendered difference, of exclusion/inclusion, and a complex symbol that carries a multiplicity of frequently shifting and often contradictory meanings,” and for Sedira, it is all the more appropriate to feature the veil so prominently in her work, “particularly in the context of Algerian history.” 19 The brutality, violence, and complexity of the Algerian War and the questions it raised about modern colonialism continue to be at the forefront of collective consciousness in both France, Algeria, and the Middle East at large; for an artist of Algerian parentage and Parisian birth who grapples openly with these subjects, Sedira’s deeply personal work becomes all the more provocative and necessary. 20

The veiling of the mind for Sedira … involves both an exploration of her social and historical positioning through personal memory and the negotiation of its often contradictory effects in the present…[She] draws upon her experiences of being brought up in two different cultures to question and disrupt the received history of Arab women and the accompanying stereotypes. 21

In one of her first major projects, Don’t do to her what you did to me (figures 7 - 9) Sedira incorporates history, the veil, and cultural identity into a video installation piece. In the film, a glass is filled with water, behind which a hand is seen writing “don’t do to her what you did to me” on the back of four identical photographs. Black ink is then dropped in the water, creating painterly effects as the ink dissipates. Next, the photographs are placed in the glass of water, where they are stirred vigorously with a metal spoon; the implement pauses occasionally, affording viewers a glimpse of the gradually disintegrating image of a woman’s face. The film closes with the artist drinking the mixture, which refers to a traditional Islamic healing charm.

Raising issues not simply confined to the veil, this charged piece introduces a host of questions about identity, culture, and control. Who is she addressing in her title? What action is she prohibiting? Who is “her”? This work reflects Sedira’s struggles with her heritage and the history that is projected upon her, weights that she desires to both understand as well as reject. Indeed, the title of the work comes from a phrase uttered by a woman on the verge of death, proclaimed in order to exorcise the conflicts between Western and Muslim cultures; it is used often by immigrant mothers to protect their young girls from becoming 'too French,' rather than good Muslims. 22 The ritualistic process she undertakes seems deeply tied to a need to make sense of the confusing and contradictory elements of her experience and to come to a resolution, so much so that she literally consumes these disparate symbols embodied by the mixture of ink, water, veiled images of herself, and text. However, she is not exorcising and delineating the conflict into separate, clear sides; rather, she is meshing them all together and absorbing them all at once. She dilutes the potency of the ink, blurring the lines of ethnicity and contrast; as it blends into the water, the ink swirls like smoke, suggesting the exoticism of the Orient – but it soon vanishes into grayness. Similarly, Sedira dispels her own veiling through submerging the photographs in water, dissolving the images and the control over them.

Returning to the concept of the veiling of the mind more explicitly in a series entitled Self Portraits or the Trinity (figures 10 and 11) Sedira depicts herself in a number of different poses, clothed head-to-toe in the traditional Algerian white headdress and voilette , the small white covering for the bottom of the face, which belonged to her mother who, now living in Algeria, is no longer required to wear it because of her age. In an installation view of a stark white wall, three photographs, each 5 ½ by 3 ½ feet tall, stand side by side; on the left, her figure is turned so the left-hand side of her body is shown, in the middle, she is seen from the back, and on the right, her right side is profiled. The photographs themselves were shot against a white background, and their edges effaced so that her body “merges into the background, like the walls of the whitewashed houses that become another metaphor for the veil.” 23 In the image on the right, her eyes are visible in thin slit in the veil around her face, but as the artist is shot in profile, the viewer is unable to make contact with her gaze. Appearing both virginal and ghost-like, Sedira is bound into a cocoon-like form, unable to express herself verbally or physically; she is consumed by the veil, capturing its ability to inflict both self-censorship as well as censorship by the veil’s nature in and of itself. The subject is not merely limited to this process of silencing, however; Sedira, through the titular and compositional references, connects this to her identity and Algerian heritage:

The use of the triptych form (usually associated with Christianity) and the veiling (which is simultaneously reminiscent of the Virgin Mary and a nun’s habit) recalls the in-between buerette culture of Sedira’s youth where the icons and rituals of French Catholicism co-existed with those of Islam and an Algerian history. In this context, the images can be seen to focus, through a re-looking at the specificities of the past, on the complex relationships between age, power and visibility, and the differing way in which women’s bodies are always subject to cultural coding and regulated across different geographies whether in the name of religion, nation, revolution or tradition. 24

These different geographies come to a crossroads at the site of her veiled, nearly amorphous body – but here, instead of absorbing the meaning, it is deflected off of herself. The ideas, the concepts converging at this crossroads – indeed, the very boundaries that she wants to challenge and make her audience aware of – become the object of discussion instead of her body or her appearance, for she is inaccessible. At the same time, however, she is prohibited from engaging in the subject herself, from inserting her own perspective; she has muted herself and left the viewer to project their subjectivity onto the gray area she offers.

The complexity of Sedira’s work lies in this multi-faceted assault: that while she is challenging the culture of the Islamic world, she is simultaneously taking on Western ideas of oppression, feminism, and liberation, and how too often the veil’s adoption is reduced to a matter of women’s subjugation.

It's also interesting in relation to the idea that the veil is always oppressive. I don't think Western women are freer than Muslim women (though, of course, it is always arguable what that means), but it is oppressive to use naked women and teenagers to sell cars. I find this more upsetting than seeing women veiled. At least she is an individual, and is encountered as a person and not a commodified form. Women in most Muslim countries are not forced to wear hijab. Here, men and women are bombarded with oppressive images of women. 25

Additionally, in traditional Islamic society, “the veil served not merely to mark the upper classes but, more fundamentally, to differentiate between “respectable” women and those who were publicly available. That is, use of the veil classified women according to their sexual activity and signaled to men which women were under male protection and which were fair game.” 26 Sedira’s introduction of the veil in this context not only subverts the process of sexualization, but it also reflects the larger aim that Sedira is trying to achieve through her work; that in a world so fragmented by religious and cultural differences, conflicting powers, disparate identities, it becomes necessary to condense all of these different appeals and return to self-control and self-knowledge, accepting the nuances of mixed identities. Everything has to be blended and bound together in order to maintain and achieve balance – one must accept the consequential grayness of living and being of a complex and diverse world while preserving and honoring the origins of this multiplicity.

The ambiguities of mixing together such charged visual elements and objects become particularly clear in two video installation pieces Portraits I and Silent Sight (figures 12 and 13) . Both feature the eyes of women, shot at close range, opening and closing their eyes; in Portraits I , four different women are shown in color, eyes shifting and lids fluttering, side by side; the blackness of the space in between each frame, perhaps substituting as a veil, allows the viewer to focus entirely on the gazes of these women. The power of the eyes to convey such strong emotion and meaning is of utter primacy, in both Neshat and Sedira’s work; in this film, Sedira is consciously amplifying their potency by eliminating all other outside references that would detract from it. The eyes, frequently the only thing one sees of a woman in a veiled society, are afforded an elevated position, one which also becomes more confrontational, although they do not suggest militancy; in fact, they seem to reflect the quirks and personalities of the women they belong to, suggesting as much information about each individual as would a more complete or revealing representation of her body.

The intricacy and non-sexualized intimacy that can be deduced simply from a woman’s glance is similarly the subject in Silent Sight , a black and white film featuring a single woman. Sedira said of this piece,

In 'Silent Sight', I wanted to look at these thoughts about the veil and sexuality and exploitation of women. The woman in it wears the chador, the heavy, black Iranian garment, but her eyes are heavily made-up like in the French films of the 1960s - lots of make-up and passive sexuality. It makes me angry that the chador is always seen as the veil. In the West, no one takes account of the many different ways women veil - the flowing white headcloths that women wear in Algeria, or the light dupatta in Pakistan… 27

Indeed, there are a multiplicity of meanings that one can associate with the veil; it can be empowering, disconcerting, and silencing all at the same time. Within a single frame, she exhibits this “passive sexuality” – which is achieved by blending East and West, the veil with the cosmetic – all of the binaries and contradictions of not only the experience of being a Muslim woman in the West, but between self and other, objectivity and subjectivity, content and meaning. The grayness, here, is a liminal “safe zone” in which she can operate and navigate a middle ground.

At the same time, however, the specific focus on the eyes causes a dislocation when it is viewed from a wider lens of perspective: “Condensed down to the organs of seeing, this abbreviated representation of the body evokes the confinement and limitations imposed on many Muslim women. In an accompanying voiceover, Sedira recounts childhood memories of trying to identify her mother among a crowd of veiled women.” 28 Taken within a narrow context, the eyes are powerful arbiters; when seen as part of a larger whole, they lose their significance, if not simply because they are overwhelmed by the ubiquitousness of the veil that covers the rest of the body.

Sedira’s treatment of veil imagery and of her own personal history that reoccur throughout her body of work – distinguishing objects that represent her and unifying the disparities into a visual and thematic collage – can also be described as a process of deconstruction and fragmentation. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in her disaggregation of the sensual parts of the body. This may be her method of singling out the targets that have been usurped traditionally by the male gaze, and her means of reclaiming control over not only her body, but also her self-image; once dissociated from the context of the whole body, they can be analyzed, their meaning readjusted and reclaimed. Indeed, as Rachel Garfield noted,

Her use of body parts such as mouths, hands and eyes are directly connected to the Islamic prohibition of representing the body while at the same time reframing the Western feminist theories of objectification. The hands, eyes and mouths, employed in several of Zineb’s works, refer to the absent body, but that body is known through the detail – the shift of the gaze; the motion of the hand, reveals the condition of the people who inhabit those hands and eyes – and the power that confers to the ostensibly absent whole reinforces the presence of those people.” 29

Sedira’s corporeal division of her body into hands, eyes, and mouth takes on a heightened significance in light of Linda Nochlin’s thesis “The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity.” 30 Nochlin’s idea of fragmentation of the body as a sign of revolution, while written in context of the French revolution, draws interesting implications when applied to Sedira’s work. Given Sedira’s own French background, her intimate connections to the Algerian war, and this war-like battle being waged between Islam and the West, the artist is perhaps re-appropriating the fragmentation caused by the veil (so that one can only see the eyes, or hands, or mouth, or other) so as to proclaim revolution, reclaim rights to her own body, and to deconstruct and thereby disempower the multitude of forces that lay claim to her identity, allowing her to define her own parameters and rest comfortably with the conflation of her own differentiated background.

Women, regardless of their location, have, for at least the last three hundred years – if not since the origins of civilization – been perpetually held up as the standard-bearers for their culture. The debate surrounding images of women still shares the same resonance today as it did centuries ago. This is all the more true in Muslim countries of the world, for the rights of women to be in public, symbolically represented by the hijab or the burkha , are the most visible and most-often criticized issues in contemporary society. The idea of women as arbiters of their nation-state has played a significant role in the Arab world since at least the Arabization movement in the 1960’s; today that concept has been altered, subverted by the West as some may claim, by viewing women’s rights solely through the guise of the popularity of veiling. Shirin Neshat and Zineb Sedira have actively worked through their art to deconstruct and explain the myths and subjective truths that have been projected onto the bodies of Middle Eastern women by history, colonialism, religion, geopolitics, and, of course, the veil and the masculine gaze. Salah Hassan perhaps captured it best when he wrote, “The simulacrum of the person portrayed (in this case willfully inserted) functions as a surrogate presence rather than a physical likeness, allowing the artist's body-image to transcend the conventional boundaries of verisimilitude , i.e. objective or literal likeness . Hence, self-portraiture becomes a form of self-representation determined by terms formulated by others, or knowingly based on their expectations.” By displaying images of themselves and their experience as Muslim women in the diaspora using the stereotypical cultural signifiers and assumptions, these artists are able to turn the colonizing effects of such stereotypes on their heads and thus recapture the usage of their bodies as a battleground for meaning and reclaim their identities from the grasp of the other. Through their pioneering work, the ambiguities and nuances of an experience known to few but lived by many are being acknowledged and understood. Empowered by the impact of such successful women abroad, more and more women of the Middle East are beginning to challenge the usurpation of their authority by their own countrymen; demanding answers and their own reclamation, on their own terms. Moreover, these artists are not only able to achieve peace with their own questions of identity and difference, but they are projecting and documenting complex and new visions of Muslim women – indeed, all women – that are profoundly important for development and comprehension of the coming century. Indeed, sea changes are on the horizon; and with time, through the lens of female power, the ownership of every one of those nine parts will transform from a passive possession into an active colonization of the self, to each her own.

Images

Figure 1 . Shirin Neshat, Allegiance with Wakefulness , 1994, gelatin silver print with ink, from the Women of Allah series, 1994. (left)

Figure 2. Neshat, Speechless , 1996, gelatin silver print and ink, 46 ¾ x 33 7/8 in. (center)

Figure 3. Neshat, Rebellious Silence , 1994, gelatin silver print and ink, 40 ¼ x 37 in. (right)

Figure 4. Neshat, Fervor Series , 2000, gelatin silver print, triptych, 49 1/8 x 61 5/8 in. each. (left)

Figure 5. Neshat, Fervor Series , 2000, video still. (right)

Figure. 6, Neshat, Fervor Series , video still, 2000.

Figure 7. Neshat, Fervor Series , video still, 2000.

Figure 8. Fervor Series (Crowd from Back, Woman Leaving) , 2000, gelatin silver print.

Figure 9. Sedira, Don’t do to her what you did to me , video still, 1998.

Figure 10. Sedira, Don’t do to her what you did to me ,

video still, 1998.

Figure 11. Zineb Sedira, Don’t do to her what you did to me , close-up of images from Fig. 9, video still, 1998.

Figure 12. Sedira, from the series Self Portraits or the Virgin Mary , 2000. Installation view.

Figure

13. Sedira, Self-Portraits or The Trinity , photographic diptych, color C prints, 2000.

Figure 14. Sedira,

Portraits 1 , Single screen projection computer generated, duration 4 minutes on loop, video still, 1999.

Figure 15. Sedira, Silent Sight , single screen video projection, original format 16mm film, 2000.

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