Lalla Essaydi
Wednesday, January 27, 2010Isabella from Germany is a regular reader and a blogger friend. So as usual I hopped across her to her interesting blog Anarkali & was struck by these pictures & how could I not share this! Calligraphy and that too Islamic - I had to find out more. These photographs are part of a solo exhibition at the DeCordova Musuem [close to Boston] by Lalla Essaydi, a New York-based, Moroccan-born photographer, painter, and installation artist. Over the past decade, she has risen to international prominence with her timely and beautiful work that deals with the condition of women in Islamic society, cross-cultural identity, Orientalism, and the history of art.
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Almost all the photographs in Les Femmes du Maroc are based on specific nineteenth-century European and American Orientalist paintings. Essaydi has, however, radically transformed the antecedents. While she retains the compositions, gestures, and general costume of the original paintings, she strips them of their opulent colors, removes male figures (or transforms them into women), erases any cues to social status, clothes all nudity, and simplifies the settings by eliminating props and attributes while introducing all-over draperies, and of course her ubiquitous calligraphy.
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