Lalla Essaydi “A New Gaze

Edwynn Houk Gallery

[Image: Lalla Essaydi "Les Femmes du Maroc: Harem Beauty #2" (2008)]

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Edwynn Houk Gallery presents Lalla Essaydi: A New Gaze. This exhibition includes 14 large-scale color photographs that bring together Essaydi’s major photographic series: Converging Territories (2002-04), Les Femmes du Maroc (2005-07), Harem (2009), and Bullets (2009-14).

Essaydi grew up in Morocco, raised her family in Saudi Arabia, and was educated in France and the United States. She brings a global sensibility to her photographic work, exploring the disconnect between Western perceptions of Muslim women and her own lived experience. She says her work “reaches beyond Islamic culture to include the Western fascination with it.” Such fascination is represented in 19th-century European Orientalist painting. By appropriating Orientalist imagery in a manner that gives her subjects agency, Essaydi confronts myths of Orientalism and invites viewers to reconsider the stereotype of the Middle Eastern and North African woman.

In reference to past Islamic customs that often restricted women to private spaces, Essaydi photographs women inside the home, yet the surroundings are not domestic but elaborately crafted tableaus. She fuses Arabic calligraphy—traditionally a skill reserved for men—and the female form by hand-painting the script not onto the surface of the photograph, but directly onto her subjects’ bodies, as well as fabrics and walls. In other images, she weaves bullets into costumes and tapestries and sews garments to mimic geometric ceramic tile, painstakingly creating layers of visual texture laden with symbolism. She prints the black border of the negative to show that the image is uncropped and unaltered.

Lalla Essaydi was born in Morocco in 1956 and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Massachusetts. She has exhibited her work across the globe, including at the National Museum of Singapore; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The San Diego Museum of Art, California; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. Her work is in numerous permanent collections, including the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore; Musée du Louvre, Paris; the British Museum, London; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha. She divides her time between Morocco and the United States.