Lalla Essaydi: Les Femmes du Maroc

Born in Morocco into a conservative Muslim family and educated in Europe and the United States, Lalla Essaydi is poised at the intersection of two cultures. She is one of several contemporary Islamic women artists whose subjects are informed by feminist perspectives and personal experience. 

The exhibition comprises 17 large scale photographs. The title of the series is adapted from Eugene Delacroix’s iconic painting Les Femmes d’Algiers of 1834. While based on his actual travels in North Africa, Delacroix’s is a fictive vision of languorous women in an opulent harem. Paintings like these, which coincided with the European occupation of much of the Arab world, fostered a view of the Middle East as a sensual paradise of sexually available women, rich colors, and exotic tastes. Essaydi takes these Orientalist paintings of the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a point of departure for her own de-colonializing enterprise. She drains the paintings of color, removes all male figures, drapes the women and all surfaces in white fabric, and sets everything within a stage-like space. All visible surface—backdrops, floor, drapery, skin—are inscribed with Arabic calligraphy, subversive on several levels. In Islamic cultures, calligraphy is a male art form, used primarily to transcribe sacred literature; however, these musings on personal freedom, cultural and individual identity, memory and communication are taken from Essaydi’s personal journals and applied with henna, a tradition associated with women. Her transformations of the original paintings reverberate with the historical past while revealing the colonial and gendered perspectives of historic and contemporary Orientalism.

Organized by the DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts, and funded by a generous grant from the Lois and Richard England Family Foundation

Coordinated by Donna Gustafson, Liaison for the Mellon Program and Assistant Curator of American Art, Zimmerli Art Museum