Lalla Essaydi - Les Femmes du Maroc, Harem Beauty, no. 27.
Opening reception: Thursday, 4 November, 6 - 8 pm Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of fifteen large-scale photographs by Lalla Essaydi from the artist’s most recent series, Harem.The show will take place from 4 November 2010 through 22 January 2011 with an opening reception for the artist on Thursday, 4 November from 6-8 PM.
Moroccan-born, New York-based photographer Lalla Essaydi (b. 1956) explores issues surrounding the role of women in Arab culture and their representation in the western European artistic tradition. Her large-scale photographs are based on nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings but work to subvert those stereotyped and sexualized representations.
Born in Morocco, Lalla Essaydi has been examining the role of the Muslim woman by incorporating layers of Islamic calligraphy applied by hand with henna, in tandem with poses directly inspired by 19th Century Orientalist painting. By appropriating this imagery, the works reflect the “complex female identities” found in Morocco and throughout the Muslim world.
War of Words. By Sayantan Mukhopadhyay. Share on Tumblr. The use of the written word in the art of Shirin Neshat and Lalla Essaydi. While often perceived as a purely aural element, the word is as important a visual tool in politically-motivated art. Shirin Neshat and Lalla Essaydi, two artists known for their use of calligraphy, add linguistic layers of coding to their photographs. Words.
Lalla Essaydi drains the paintings of color, removes all male figures, drapes the women and all surfaces in white fabric, and sets everything within a shallow stage-like space. All visible surface -backdrops, floor, drapery, skin — are inscribed with Arabic calligraphy. These texts are subversive on several levels. In Islamic cultures calligraphy is a male art form, used primarily to.
Profile: Lalla Essaydi. October 4, 2016 Administrator. HAVING GROWN UP in Morocco, lived in Saudi Arabia, which was then followed by studies in France and the US, Lalla Essaydi finds herself in a unique position to create work about women in the Arab world. Relying on Orientalist paintings as her starting point, she stages large scale photographs that deconstruct these Orientalist paintings.
Haunted by space both actual and metaphorical, remembered and constructed, Lalla Essaydi’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.