“She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World”
In the current sociopolitical climate, it is difficult to address aesthetic production emerging from the Arab world without incurring an often polarized response of benediction or ire. Formerly neglected and emerging voices from the region are now circulating in the international art market thanks to both a surge of private galleries, art fairs, biennials, and museums opening in the Middle East and a swell of interest in the West, as evidenced by exhibitions (albeit problematically titled ones) such as “Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East” at Saatchi Gallery in 2009; “Light from the Middle East: New Photography” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2012–13; “The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art and Society,” organized by the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art in 2012;and “Come Invest in Us. You’ll Strike Gold” at the HilgerBrot-Kunsthalle in 2012. To some, these are healthy signs that long-misrepresented populations are critically deconstructing and reconstituting their identities through a plurality of artistic forms and avenues of dissemination; to others, it is a symptom of a new regime of colonialism produced by the racialized and regulatory forces of neoliberal capitalism and an endless state of war.
Drawing on the name of the all-female photographic collective from the Middle East, Rawiya, which translates as “she who tells a story,” this exhibition, curated by Kristen Gresh, presents the work of twelve women photographers who challenge gender stereotypes by engaging imported and local conventions of visual representation, tropes of Orientalized femininity, and allusions to the private and public spheres constructed by power relations within which the artists live and work. For instance, Tanya Habjouqa’s “Women of Gaza,” 2009, employs a straight documentary style to reveal uncensured moments of leisure and levity for women living under the double siege of the Israeli nation-state and an entrenched patriarchy; Jananne Al-Ani’s video Shadow Sites II, 2011, uses aerial photography to survey an Iraqi landscape, the abstraction of which, by means of satellite imagery, had eased its transformation into a merciless theater of operations during both of the Gulf wars; Newsha Tavakolian’s “Listen” series, 2010, presents large-format portraits of Iranian singers who are forbidden to perform in public, accompanied by designs for imaginary CD covers and muted videos in which they passionately sing tunes that remain unheard.
“She Who Tells a Story” succeeds in picturing a more nuanced spectrum of Middle Eastern femininity for a Western audience inundated by a narrow, ideologically mediated selection of imagery. Rather than offering typical representations of submissive women, these works “tell” of the access that each artist had to spaces often unavailable to their male counterparts or of situations that materialized as a response to the photographer’s (empowered) gendered presence. However, despite the best intentions to support the work of talented practitioners from Iran and the Arab world, the exhibition also promotes the mythical discourse of the personal story, a traditionally anthropologized, benevolent, and humanistic narrative of “other” people and places that masks the postcolonial politics of indigence inherent to such museological endeavors.
As the accompanying curatorial statement suggests, the show was conceived as “an invitation . . . to open a cultural dialogue that is not centered on conflict and politics, but begins with the art and interwoven histories of a selection of extraordinary photographers.” The desire to foreground aesthetic production over politics is understandable, and these images certainly stand on their own as inventive artistic statements. Nevertheless, we should be wary of any insistence on art before politics, since the very crux of this and many similar curatorial projects inevitably contains a political kernel. To frame an exhibition around one of the most vexed geopolitical hot spots and to delineate it around national and gender difference is still the privilege of the Western museum, which has the mandate to define its terms of engagement with respect to aesthetic plurality, so long as such subjects are not too uncomfortably political.