Veil works 2013
These works started with my fascination with Gaitan De Clerambaults obsessive and somewhat fetishistic photographs of veiled Moroccan women – where simple rough fabric takes precedence over a usual kind of photographic Orientalism, where Eastern women are seen as sexually available odalisques or caged and hidden slaves.
It was the use of material and its many meanings that caught my eye and have subsequently led to a much more complex understanding of the global and historical currents that flow from those ideas.
My subjective experiences of being a unveiled European woman in an Islamic country made me look much more closely at drapery, its connections with colonialism, with Orientalism and with our own current debates.
Debates around the Muslim and notions of the Islamic are affecting our societies deeply. The West’s involvement in North Africa and the Middle East, the influx of Muslim immigrants from all over the Islamic world and their visibility on our streets mean that we are experiencing a real change in our views of ourselves. We are not a homogenous entity of Westerners and Easterners. And the wearing of a veil does not necessarily mean one thing.
The Islamic religion and the regions history is far more complex than most Westerners realise, comprised of many millions of adherents often with very different views of what is Islamic or not Islamic. Many of the Islamic nations have had a long history of corrupt governments, wars and economic deprivations.
I loathe the idea, the kind of feminist Orientalism that uses the veiled woman as a metaphor for female oppression generally. It is far too one dimensional and I am conscious of trying not to fall into that trap. It would be patronising and too simplistic to look at the veil or veiling this way, just as it is to view female nakedness as being representative of freedom. Neither is true, it depends on the context.
This year the Ukranian feminist group FEMEN held a ‘solidarity action’, where they demonstrated naked in support of a Tunisian woman who was punished for baring her breasts on Facebook. The outcry from various Muslimahs and others lambasting Femen for racism and colonialism and for getting attention with their nakedness has further simplified global and historical issues.
Its interesting to note that in the media reactions – veiled or naked, women are reduced to their bodies and their sexuality and that the debates assume that women and their issues are somehow divorced from specific historical and political agents. Femen may be Islamaphobic or racist and have a narrow pop feminist stance but it is Eastern European women who have been sex trafficked en masse and exploited in many other ways.
I recently met Ukrainian photographer Roman Pyatkova who has just won the 2013 Sony World photography award for conceptual photography. He uses home spun photographs of orgies and naked girls over political propaganda images. The nude images were forbidden for people to take and to own and for him represent a moment in time. His photographs are of ordinary people expressing their own version of freedom. “Our tiny apartments, our personal and even intimate life became the proving grounds for our art,” he explains. Lacking high-quality equipment, materials and formal education, he explains photographic art was made more intellectual. “Our existence outside the socialist context critically distanced us from the Soviet art system and the political structure in general.” http://cargocollective.com/pyatkovka/
Im now looking at using the street, urban spaces both in the East and the West and mixing personal imagery that comes from a specific point in time to try to express complex ideas around the clashes in contemporary cultures.
