Haunted by space both actual and metaphorical, remembered and constructed, Lalla Essaydiâ€™s work reaches beyond Islamic culture to invoke the Western fascination with the veil and the harem as

Les Femmes Du Maroc

Haunted by space both actual and metaphorical, remembered and constructed, Lalla Essaydiâ€™s work reaches beyond Islamic culture to invoke the Western fascination with the veil and the harem as expressed in nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings with the odalisque. The world that Western artists encountered in North Africa was suffused with the exquisite beauty of the architecture, the interior dÃ©cor, and womenâ€™s clothing. It is this beauty that Moroccan-born artist Essaydi reclaims in Les Femmes du Maroc, her second powerHouse Book.

Essaydiâ€™s work revisits the world of women, suggesting the complexity of feminine identity and the tension between hierarchy and fluidity that are at the heart of Arab culture. Not simply a critique of either Arab or Western culture, Essaydiâ€™s photography offers a more active, even subversive engagement with cultural patterns to convey her own experience as an Arab woman.

In these images, the text adorning the womenâ€™s bodies is partly autobiographical. Essaydi speaks her own thoughts and experiences directly, as a woman caught between the past and present, between East and West, and also as an artist, exploring the language in which to â€œspeakâ€ from this uncertain space. Without specificity of place, the text itself becomes the world of the subjectsâ€”their thoughts, speech, clothing, shelter, and nomadic home. However, this text is incomplete. It involves the viewer as well as the writer in a continual process of reading and revising, of losing and finding in its multiple and discontinuous threads. Similarly, the women in the photographs require multiple visual readings. Both are as elusive as â€œwomanâ€ herselfâ€”not simply because she is veiled but because she is still in progress.

Country	USA
Author	Fatema Mernissi
Binding	Hardcover
Brand	Essaydi, Lalla (PHT)/ Mernissi, Fatema
EAN	9781576874912
Edition	First Edition
Feature	Used Book in Good Condition
ISBN	1576874915
IsEligibleForTradeIn	1
Label	powerHouse Books
Manufacturer	powerHouse Books
MPN	9781576874912
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	94
PartNumber	9781576874912
PublicationDate	2009-10-16
Publisher	powerHouse Books
ReleaseDate	2009-10-16
Studio	powerHouse Books

Les Femmes Du Maroc

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