Of Veils, Feminisms, and Contemporary Art

Most images of Muslim veils in the mainstream art world challenge the historically entrenched sign of what I call the veil because, as the focus of continued social and political debates in Europe and North America, it functions as a collectively shared sign for the unagentic Muslim woman, the backwardness of Islam, and the alleged incompatibility between the West and Islam. The veil in mainstream Western culture has, since the colonial period, constituted a fixed sign that erects a metaphorical Iron Curtain between the two imagined discursive categories of the West and the Muslim world. From this perspective, the garment divides the world in two, opposing a democratic, progressive, feminist, free, peaceful, and secular West to a totalitarian, unchanging, misogynistic, repressive, violent, and theocratic Islam. Its function as an ideological mapping of the world explains the potency of the sign. It also, I argue, forecloses the possibility of individual contestations of the veil, as these are automatically lost and subsumed in the geopolitical binarism. However, artists of Muslim background may replicate the schema as a provocation strategy and to gain notoriety. Maïmouna Guerresi Faluka, 2010. Photo : © Maïmouna Guerresi, courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Seattle The upholding of equality between men and women is a major component of social and political discourses brought forth to justify banning or limiting the wearing of headscarves or face veils in Europe and North America. The argument that all veiled Muslim women are subservient, are forced to wear head or face coverings, and, more dangerously, are neither social agents nor subjects is, unfortunately, one to which some individuals and groups who define themselves as feminists subscribe. Underwriting these unquestioned “truths” are, in addition to mainstream negative Western perceptions of Islam, the (understandably) ambivalent relationship among religion, modernity, and the women’s movement and the concomitant notion that women’s equality and empowerment are possible only within a certain social paradigm and scopic or sartorial regime. Feminist positions that deny agency to visibly Muslim women inadvertently replicate colonially rooted dominant discourses on the veil. This reveals the problematic and rarely acknowledged parallels between the feminist project and that of colonialism, founded on a modern collective self-identity in which the Western subject, articulated through distinction with cultural others, is posited as normative, universal, and superior.See Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Arwa AbouonMirror Mirror / Allah Allah, 2012.Photos : courtesy of the artist The division of the world into “same” and “different” continues to structure what is called hegemonic or imperial feminism despite the emergence of a broad range of alternative feminisms, such as Chicana, Third World, Black, Postcolonial, Indigenous, and Islamic. Discussing the constitutive role that “otherness” plays in feminist subjectivity, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, deputy director of the Asia Institute at Monash University, Australia, writes, “Whether it is the New Woman engaged in its imperial mission of civilizing the heathen woman, or the neo-colonial feminist invested in bringing liberty to the veiled Islamic one, hegemonic feminism imagines itself only by creating its Other.”Mridula Nath Chakraborty, “Wa(i)ving it All Away: Producing Subject and Knowledge in Feminisms of Colours,” in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, ed. Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 207. The dependence of self-identity on “inferior” others underscores the difficulty of changing perceptions of the veil, and therefore Islam, but also the radical potential of alternative representations of visibly Muslim women in contemporary art. Images are potent agents; if they produce and reproduce social norms and perceptions, then they can equally transform and rewrite them. Ghazel ME series, Feminist, since 1997. © Ghazel / SODRAC (2017) Photo : courtesy of Carbon 12, Dubai Many well-known artists in the mainstream art world have referenced veiled Muslim women.Among the best known in Europe and North America are Zineb Sedira, Shadi Ghadirian, Sara Rahbar, Sama Alshaibi, Khosrow Hassanzadeh, Samta Benyahia, Lalla Essaydi, Helen Zughaib, Boushra Almutawakel, Farheen Haq, and Sylvat Aziz. This plurality of representations is born of the artists’ culturescapes, plural identities, or conscious will to counter stereotypes. Although several exhibitions on the veil have circulated and a few studies have addressed the topic in the last decade, the danger is — as in this essay — that these largely postcolonial endeavours may result in a further consolidation of the problematic trope. Moreover, focusing on the Muslim veil, like focusing on artefacts in a museum, decontextualizes the garment from its culture(s), in which veiling is ever present as an aesthetic element and metaphor in literature, art, architecture, home décor, and even male fashion. Interestingly, although artists who happen to wear a hijab, such as Zahra Hussain, Safaa Erruas, Sabah Naim, and, in Canada, Soheila Esfahani are increasingly present in the mainstream Western art apparatus, those whose work showcases hijabs, with extremely few exceptions (such as Asma Shikoh and Nuha Asad), do not. If feminism is to really mean equality and social justice for all, it must be anti-hegemonic and refuse to dehumanize any woman, regardless of whether or not her lifestyle or clothing choices reflect the majority view. Images of veiled Muslim women that resuture veiling and subjectivity are thus inherently feminist, as testified to by the work of Ghazel, Arwa Abouon, and Maïmouna Guerresi. These artists have consciously adopted a bicultural, bifocal vision that blurs binarism and its accompanying “clash of civilizations” discourse. GhazelME series, Jane Fonda, since 1997.© Ghazel / SODRAC (2017)Photo : courtesy of Carbon 12, Dubai Iranian artist Ghazel, who lives in Paris and Tehran, is best known internationally for her ongoing autobiographical series Me (1997 —), now numbering over 750 episodes. The mostly black-and-white video self-portraits, exhibited on old TV sets, feature the artist in a black chador undertaking activities such as waterskiing, sunbathing, riding a motorbike, commenting on the world, and dreaming of being a Botticelli Venus. The uncanny juxtapositions of the garment and the actions enact Ghazel’s experience of living between cultures and being the perpetual outsider; yet, their expression of modern nomadism also collapses the cultural borders usually traced by the veil. The embodied performance of the Me “heroine” whose voice is conveyed via the English or French text appearing at the bottom of the frame communicates the agency of a desubjectified figure in Euro-American visual culture.Like much culturally hybrid art, Me acts as a double critique, targeting both Western and Iranian restrictive conceptions of Muslim women. The humour of the scenes, which allows spectators to laugh with and not at the other, further deflates the notion of the passive, selfless, oppressed Muslim woman. Accessible and funny, Me decolonizes perceptions by clearing a space for marginalized subjectivity to be sensed and heard, something that Ghazel continues in her video and performance work with and around undocumented migrants, such as Road Movie (2010 and 2012) and Home (stories) (2008). Canadian artist of Libyan Amazigh descent Arwa Abouon also takes plural identity as a subject. Although she shares several concerns and strategies with Ghazel, her work, with its purposeful deployment of beauty, is diametrically opposed to Ghazel’s aesthetic philosophy of the mal fait.See Ghazel, “Interview” (with Valerie Behiery), Mea Culpa, exh. cat. (Dubai: Carbon 12 Gallery, 2016). For Abouon, art is a means of exploring the genealogy of and producing knowledge about her familial and cultural lineage. I’m Sorry / I Forgive You (2012), a photographic diptych, features the artist’s middle-aged parents; in one image, Abouon’s veiled mother kisses her husband on the forehead; in the other, he kisses his wife. Made at the trying time of Abouon’s father’s terminal cancer, the piece celebrates the couple’s reconciled relationship. The universal gesture of the kiss connotes the woman’s (and the man’s) agency and, more significantly, injects the absent theme of love into discussions on and representations of Muslims. The geometric patterns evoking Islamic art that overlay the couple and the surrounding space, with their cross-culturally readable, op art-like visuality, are Abouon’s way of enshrining love and human life. Mirror Mirror / Allah Allah (2012) also maps veiled subjectivity, albeit here as part of the artist’s structuring imaginary unseen by the public — Abouon, unlike her mother, does not wear the hijab — and the humorous reference to the famous fairy tale enables the translation of and identification with Abouon and her probing of her identities. Arwa AbouonI’m Sorry / I Forgive You, 2012.Photos : courtesy of the artist Italian artist Maïmouna Guerresi first worked in body art steeped in feminism and ancient myth. Since encountering West African Sufism in the 1990s, she has sought to communicate the vision and the aesthetic possibilities that the experience opened up. Like Ghazel and Abouon, Guerresi employs a visual vocabulary drawn from both Western and Islamic traditions. For example, her Giants series, composed of monumental photographs in which elongated African men and women wearing costumes made by Guerresi appear to be floating in space, was initially inspired by a Piero della Francesca painting.Guerresi’s photographs are artisanal in that she fashions the costumes and paints the backdrops herself, rather than using software such as Photoshop. Genitilla Al Wilada (2007), from the Giants series, depicts a woman emanating strong individuality. Her head and body are draped in white, and her abdomen has become a galaxy out of which bubbles-cum- planets emerge. The veil here evokes European, Middle Eastern, and West African iconography, and the archetypal dimension of the universal Earth Mother figure positions it within equally transcultural symbolist visual traditions.That the woman is African equally displaces dominant imagery of Muslim women and raises the issue of racialization and racism in both the West and the Middle East. What is important here is that veiling — coupled with the void — expresses an inner vision by articulating the body as abode, spirit, and space. Embodying the metaphorical function of veiling found at the heart of traditional Islamic art to communicate the ineffable, Giants therefore also posits the limits of representation, an issue that has been central to Western feminist art and theory. Maïmouna GuerresiGenitilla Al Wilada, 2017.Photo : © Maïmouna Guerresi, courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Seattle Maïmouna GuerresiSuspended, 2008.Photo : © Maïmouna Guerresi, courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Seattle Ghazel’s, Abouon’s, and Guerresi’s depictions of the veil demonstrate the sign’s elasticity, confirming the existence of veils rather than the veil. Ghazel plays with the garment as an outsider to its assumed meanings in both contexts, Abouon treats it from an autobiographical perspective as part of her familial and imaginal landscape, and Guerresi highlights its role as an aesthetic strategy and shared iconographic tradition. All three artists consciously image veiled subjectivity. A truism from a non-hegemonic feminist or humanistic perspective, the (new in this context) trope of veiled subjectivity challenges imperial feminism and other collective social and political “isms” to acknowledge the subjecthood of, and establish a new relationship with, all minoritized subjects perceived, produced, and defined as others. All the works examined here are narrative; the stories that they tell are autobiographical yet transcend the personal. Culturally and visually “bilingual,” these works assemble cultures and signs plotted as antithetical, allowing both marginalized subjectivities and novel identities to emerge. Arwa Abouon, Maïmouna Guerresi, Valerie Behiery

Of Veils, Feminisms, and Contemporary Art

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