Lalla Essaydi: From "Converging Territories" to "Harem Revisited"

Lalla Essaydi is an internationally renowned artist who works in painting, installation, and photography. Born and raised in Morocco, she moved to the United States and earned her M.F.A. at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Tufts in 2003. As she explains, her artistic endeavors originated with the desire to examine her personal experience—to revisit her childhood in Morocco and consider the “converging territories” of her present life as a North African-born artist and woman living in America. This exhibition includes photographs spanning from the artist’s earliest series “Converging Territories” to the more recent series “Harem Revisited.” Bringing together photographs from different periods of the artist’s career, this exhibition illustrates Essaydi’s enduring engagement with culture, gender, and identity.

For her photographic work, Essaydi constructs narratives, often within Islamic architectural spaces. By drawing on imagery reminiscent of Orientalist paintings, Essaydi underscores Western fantasies about the East, and Arab women in particular. At the same time she undermines these fantasies by clothing her female subjects and inscribing them with calligraphy, a sacred Islamic art form accessible only to men in the Arab world. Using henna for this calligraphy, Essaydi re-asserts the role of women in art and writing (henna is a form of art and adornment practiced by women). According to the artist, “By reclaiming the rich tradition of calligraphy and interweaving it with the traditionally female art of henna, I have been able to express, and yet, in another sense, dissolve the contradictions I have encountered in my culture: between hierarchy and fluidity, between public and private space, between the richness and the confining aspects of Islamic traditions.” Exploring these contradictions and disrupting stereotypes about women of the East, Essaydi’s work promotes a timely discussion of cultural perspectives and gender.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.