Artist Exhibition Statement

The invention of photography in the mid-19th century coincided with the height of European imperialism. Ambitions of domination in the Middle East and North Africa introduced a new colonialist instrument: the camera. It ushered in a century-long appetite for capturing colonial possession through its Orientalist gaze. Western photographers manufactured visual clichés of the colonial subject by creating a spurious portrayal of an undeveloped society. The perception of inferior Middle Eastern and North African peoples was founded on Orientalist constructions of a submissive female––an exotic, erotic, and docile body. Rendered physically tiny and inconsequential in portrait cartes-de-visite that were coveted across the European marketplace, she was made consumable. The compulsory Orientalist studio props, such as the hookah, Mashrabiya, oriental carpet, ethnic costume, and water vessel, alongside the lounging female body, produced a familiar code in the fictitious Oriental scene. Its decorative function was, in effect, a tool for constructing otherness. 

I present and reframe Orientalist photography in the Middle East and North Africa along the historical timeline, replicating the traditional print processes while unsettling the Oriental portrait captured by the ever-evolving technology and considering the influence of such dehumanizing imagery in contemporary depictions circulated by Western news, popular media, social media platforms, and mobile phones. The aftermath is registered in everything from culturally insensitive animation characters of Disney films to cellphone photos of Iraqi prisoners tortured by U.S. soldiers in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. The Middle Eastern and North African body portrayed as uncivilized and consequently disposable finds its origins in the visual conventions of Orientalist portraiture. My work interrogates the burden of these scene-making props by exaggerating their scale and absurd function while carried over the subject’s head. I also examine counter-image strategies promoted by pan-Arab liberation movements of the mid-20th century, in which the female subject is represented as a revolutionary fighter committed to the collective struggle for sovereignty over their bodies and land.