Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

This paper investigates ways in which images of architectural backgrounds in three contemporary artists allow them to negotiate and articulate hybrid identities. Considering Lalla Essaydi’s “Harem” photo series, Shirin Neshat’s “Soliloquy” video installation, and Hassan Hajjaj’s “‘Kesh Angels” photo series, I discuss various means by which artists employ architectural settings to explore relationships with cultural spaces. Studying contemporary art of the Islamic world necessitates consideration of the ways in which Orientalist fantasies and the imagination of colonial authority shape aesthetic culture. Scholarship on this subject is lacking in consideration of the ways that architectural settings contribute to this discussion. Homi Bhabha posited that the colonial subject may assume a hybrid identity, repurposing colonial aesthetics to incorporate traditional forms and in turn reclaiming agency by taking control of their own representation. Considering Maurice Merlot-Ponty’s discussion of phenomenology and embodiment, individuals’ physical and sensory experiences are formative in understanding and building identity. Within this framework, the situation of figures in particular spaces is not merely the backdrop of a meditation on their identities, but rather a meaningful component of the message. I posit that in the three works I identified, architecture anchors the featured women in a cultural space. Their placement in relation to architectural structures is a means by which audiences can understand their connections to tradition and modernity. In this, each artist deconstructs binaries between the so-called “Occident” and “Orient,” between tradition and modernity, and in turn cultivates a representation that makes visible the instability of these binaries.