Lalla Essaydi

About the Work• Lalla Essaydi has pushed the boudaries of

muslum art recently over short period of time• Arab Muslim women are restricted from using

a calligraphy known as maghribi but within her work she covers everything in her own journal writings and poems that have to do with what it means to be a Muslim and an artist

• This concept of contradiction within her religion deals well and speaks about my own artwork not just conceptually but visually also

About the Work• Within her two series of photos titled

“converging territories” and Les Femmes du Maroc.

• The women in the pictures are a literal translation of what Lalla has learned and what she was taught within her own religion. These women within the picture act out exactly what is happening in her writings, what she sees happening in her own religion and how making art and the contradictions inside of her come out in her work. The writing makes her photos personal instead of them just being a photo of Muslim women she also puts herself and her own stories within these series of photos to open people up to the world she has been part of for so long.

• These women in the picture experience by women who are experiencing the same things she is within her religion.

About the Artist• Morroccan born in 1956 later brought up in saudi arabia• Now lives and works in New York, Boston, and Morrocco • Essaydi grew up in Morocco, and lived in Saudi Arabia for a number of years before

she moved to the United States and settled in Boston. She now lives in New York and Marrakech. In 1994, Essaydi studied painting at L’Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Paris, France. She has a Diploma in photography and installation from School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA. In 1999, Essaydi received a B.F.A from Tufts University, Medford and M.A and M.F.A from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University in 2003. Essaydi’s work has been exhibited in many major cities in the United States, Europe and the Middle East and Waterhouse & Dodd held her first ever UK solo exhibition, titled Crossroads, last year. Her works have entered into some very prestigious royal collections and can be found in numerous private and public collections across the world including The British Museum, London; The Fries Museum, the Netherlands; The Museum of Fine arts, Boston and the Chicago Art Institute to name but a few.

Lalla Essaydi is a New York-based, Moroccan-born photographer, painter, and installation artist. Over the past decade, she has risen to international prominence with her timely and beautiful work that deals with the condition of women in Islamic society, cross-cultural identity, Orientalism, and the history of art. Like her feminist Muslim expatriate contemporaries—Ghada Amer, Ambreen Butt, Emily Jacir, Sherin Neshat, and Shahzia Sikander—Essaydi has developed a powerful and personal artistic voice that calls into question prevailing myths, power hierarchies, and traditions that limit human freedom.This solo exhibition at DeCordova is the first American museum presentation of Essaydi's most recent body of work, Les Femmes du Maroc. Like her earlier photographic series, Converging Territories (2005), the images in Les Femmes du Maroc present Moroccan women in staged narratives. These women inhabit a place that is literally and entirely circumscribed by text, written directly on their bodies, apparel, and their surroundings by the artist herself.Les Femmes du Maroc expands upon Essaydi's previous work in several important ways. These photographs critique contemporary social structures, but simultaneously confront historical attitudes that have helped in great part to construct past and present representations of Arab women. The title of the series is a modification of Les Femmes d'Algiers, a painting by French Romantic Artist Eugène Delacroix from 1834. Most of the photographs in Les Femmes du Maroc are based on specific nineteenth-century European and American Orientalist paintings; Essaydi, however, has radically transformed the antecedents. While she retains the compositions, gestures, and general costume of the original paintings, she strips them of their opulent colors, removes male figures, erases cues to social status, clothes all nudity, and incorporates her ubiquitous calligraphy. Les Femmes du Maroc unmasks the fetishistic, formulaic, and sometimes pornographic aspects of Orientalist panting and the Western view of Arab women they encapsulate. Traversing the geographic, political, and religious divides between East and West, history and the present, Essaydi's photographs foster timely discourse about Orientalism and cross-cultural understanding today.