BOUSHRA AL MUTAWAKEL

There are as many types of women who wear a veil as there are who wear makeup or high-heeled shoes. This is what Boushra Al Mutawakel -considered by some to be the first Yemeni professional female photographer -wants to explore in her veils series.

Aware of the regularity with which the veil is investigated or used as icon in art from the Arab world, Al Mutawakel had reservations about exploring what has become such a powerful symbol to this region and to the west. Though directly associated with the Arab world and Islam, it would be wrong to attempt to narrowly define the veil. Hijabs are worn by believers, and sometimes also by non-believers. They are strong women, weak women and everything in between. The veil may be worn by choice, or by obligation. Some wear occasionally, and some exclusively in public. What Al Mutawakel hopes to highlight is that under the veil, women are individual and varied, and to a culture that includes the veil, there is both good and bad associated with it, and there are lovers and haters of the now loaded garment.

As Al Mutawakel wrote in one of our email exchanges, "In this ongoing project I want to explore the many faces and facets of the veil based on my own personal experiences and observations:  the convenience, freedom, strength, the power, liberation, limitations, the danger, the humor and the irony, the variety, cultural, social, and religious aspects, the beauty, mystery, the veil as a form of self expression, protection, the veil as not  solely an Arab Middle Eastern phenomenon, trends, the politics of the veil, the fear in regards to the veil, and so on.

I have very mixed feeling on the hijab and the veil...there are certain aspects I like and others I don't. I don't think it is black or white. It is a dynamic complex topic. I also want to be careful not to fuel the stereotypical widespread negative image most commonly portrayed about the hijab/veil in the Western media. Especially the notion that most or all women who wear the hijab/niqab are all weak, oppressed, and backwards."

Al Mutawakel ends our  recent exchange with "I hope to challenge  and look at both Western and Middle Eastern stereotypes, fears, and ideas regarding the veil."

Sequence News published this video about Al Mutawakel and her work dealing with veils. One thing that strikes me as interesting in it is the pride with which Al Mutawakel views the 'abaya Barbie'. To Al Mutawakel, Barbie seems to be a symbol of the west, perhaps of the power of women, the freedom of fashion. Ironically, Barbie has fought a reputation of being anti-feminist in the country where she was created. She is associated with the promotion of unrealistic body image, and, though they have fought it in more recent years, Mattel has been accused of sexism due to the abundance of pink vehicles, nurses uniforms and bikinis they have sold to accessorize the legendary doll. I suppose views on Barbie, just as on the veil, are a matter of perspective.

Editors addendum

After publishing this post, Al Mutawakel sent me an email, part of which said: 

"Also I wanted to make the correction regarding the doll. It is called Fulla, not abaya Barbie and is produced by New Boy not Mattel. Although someone who had done an article about the Fulla doll, said based on his research it turned out both dolls were made by the same manufacturere. Also, I am not necessarily a fan of the Barbie doll (although I had several as a child), especially the distorted and unrealistic body image it perpetrates. Because Barbie is such an iconic doll, and one that has such tremendous success both in the US and internationally, that i felt it was great that Fulla was the Middle Eastern version of the Barbie, doll, providing girls from the region another choice or an alternative, something that was more representative of them (as opposed to the super skinny, large busted, blonde blue-eyed doll). It is actually really interesting that the Fulla dolls come with permanent long underwear, and have slightly more realistic body dimensions....ie: much smaller bust, and larger waists. I didn't feel that that point came accross in the feature. I hope I was able to clarify myself."

For additional reading, there is also a Q&A from the Yemen Observer here.

 

HALA EL KOUSSY

Photographer, video and installation artist Hala El Koussy has created an enormous mural comprised of forty-eight panes and totaling ten by thirty feet. The Myths and Legends Room - The Mural, weaves a story which borrows facts and not so factual events and experiences from real life in Cairo, as well from myths and legends. It depicts both historic and recent events, and as curator Jelle Bouwhuis - winner of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize along with El Koussy writes over at Universe in Universe,

"For a better understanding of the Mural's creative background, first reference has to be made to commemorative wall paintings such as those in the National Military Museum in Cairo depicting various war scenes from Egypt's history, the heroism of the military, and its popular support. The Mural hints at this reference through the representation of a scene from the October War Panorama, which celebrates the 1973 victory over Israel. In the Military Museum, some of these paintings are hierarchically centered on the main protagonist, the military leader. In El Koussy's mural this central figure, the Black Soldier, who sports a prosthetic cow leg and a fishing net as his sole weapon, is rather an anti-hero inspired by the Egyptian writer Youssef Idris' short story dealing with state brutality in the pre-revolution era.

The mythical and the legendary in the Mural are not only specific events. They are responses from within the highly complex entity that is the city, dealing with the overarching, imposed state control and its means of self-propaganda that penetrates the media and the educational system, resulting in political apathy and constituting an ever-changing and constantly self-stabilizing structure through the interests and belief systems of millions of pressurized individual inhabitants."

ARCHNET ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY FROM MUSLIM WORLD

For those who are interested in architectural or archaeological photography from the muslim world, Archnet has a digital library of images as historic document which may be of interest.

Archnet was created for a community of architects, urban planners/designers, architects, conservationists, scholars etc., but the database of images will certainly appeal to more than just those with associated careers. With images of sites, architecture, ruins and monuments, the scientific approach to documenting these images gives a very different take on them than a fine art approach or an architect's requirements would. Photographing rarely visited places from multiple vantage points and with varying degrees of environment for context, these images are historic record first and photographs second. Sites, such as the Mas'ud III Minaret, Ghazni, Afghanistan which is pictured here are preserved and shared in the digital world for those of us that aren't able to make it to see the real thing. 


Contemporary and historic images are archived on the site. 

AFSOON

Afsoon is an Iranian artist who's work could be considered printmaking as much as it could be photography. More-so in fact, since the photos which her works are based on are appropriated. Though not taking the images herself, the portraits are central to the works. Appropriation is a topic we are continuing to see discussed more and more frequently and a number of photography blogs have devoted large amounts of text to the subject. Conscientious alone yields 26 entries when "appropriate" it typed into the search field.

The photographs, in the case of Afsoon's work, are generally official looking portraits of politicians or high profile citizens. The images are re-photographed and through a number of generations, are blended into a final artwork that has much in common with a postage stamp by the time she is finished. 

Afsoon's 2009 series Fairytale Icons, draws on mostly Iranian characters from her childhood in the 60's and 70's. As Afsoon explains, "As a child I was told many fairy tales of beautiful princesses and brave heroes. They faced life's challenges and always emerged happy and victorious. I believed in fairy tales. My chosen icons lived expectantly. hoping, wishing, dreaming. They were loved and admired and they fulfilled many of their hopes and dreams. But what happened to them in the end? Did these fairytale icons really live happily ever after? And if not, what chance do we have of a fairytale ending?"

ABDALLAH FARAH POSTCARDS

In 1968, Abdallah Farah was 16 and working in his fathers photo studio -Studio Wahed -in downtown Beirut. The studio was asked by the Lebanese Tourism Agency to photograph the most beautiful places in Beirut for a series of postcards meant to idealize and the promote the higher end hotels, the modern infrastructure, and the character and charm of the city.
On behalf of Studio Wahed, Farah photographed the beaches, the souqs, the hotels, and, with the help of the tourism agency and the army, also took aerial shots of the city. Reprints of these postcards can still be found in Beirut, and, though often imitated, they have distinguished themselves among Lebanese postcards.

Studio Wahed was destroyed when civil war broke out in 1975. Farah rescued some negatives from the studio -notably the postcard negatives. As the city was being destroyed around him, Farah began to inflict similar harm to the original negatives of his postcard project. Bit by bit he held them to flame and burned and melted them, scarring them as his city was being scarred. According to the filmmakers/teachers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige from Abbout Productions, "He imitated the destruction of the buildings he saw gradually disappearing because of bombings and street battles. He began by doing so in a highly organized and documented way, following the trajectory of the shelling and defacing the images to parallel the events of the day. ...Later, Abdallah began inflicting, accidentally or deliberately, additional destructions to those same buildings." These negatives now became new images, rather than damaged originals. They reflected a time in the history of Farah's city that he did not want to see forgotten or disguised by selective memories and pretty postcards.

Hadjithomas and Khalil curated Wonder Beirut around three stages of Farah's images. The first being the original postcards, the second  -the intentionally damaged postcard images, and lastly... and this is astounding... "a series of latent images that Farah has been taking -but not developing or printing -since confined to his home during the 1975 fighting. As Hadjithomas and Khalil describe it, while sheltering, usually in his home or a bomb shelter, "He used the un-shot rolls of film salvaged from his studio; but, short on products, fixatives and most of all, paper, he was not able to develop his images. The photographed films began to pile up, waiting for a better day, for a moment when the shelling would stop and Abdallah would be able to go out. Since -and despite the end of the war -he maintains this habit. He doesn't develop his images anymore. It suffices just to shoot them. The reels accumulate, without him feeling a need to reveal them. He nonetheless precisely documents each photograph he takes in a small notebook, describing it thoroughly. They are there to be read, leaving an immense space for the imagination. He entitles this work the 'invisible images' or the 'image in the text'."