Art and Femininity at a Crossroads

In Les Femmes du Maroc #I [Figure I] (2005), a photograph from the series Les Femmes du Maroc (2005–2007), renowned Moroccan-born multimedia artist Lalla Essaydi restages prominent Orientalist French painter Eugène Delacroix's Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment) (1834; Louvre). When juxtaposed, as is often the case in exhibitions of Essaydi's works, which include a miniature of Femmes D’Alger placed side by side with her photograph, the contrast between the two images is striking. Even though Essaydi maintains the postures of the four women in Delacroix's painting, she immediately transports the viewer to a different atmosphere. In Essaydi's photograph, Delcroix's lush color technique and harem interior disappear behind an off-white cloth covered with calligraphy written in henna, which is used both as background and for the women's clothes. Instead of exotic objects and opulent colors, the viewer is left with a monochromatic color palette dominated by a continuum of beige and brown. The juxtaposition of Orientalist tropes, Arab-Islamic cultural signs, and photography evokes a site of plurality, interaction, and negotiation that situates Moroccan women’s identity in between Arab-Muslim and Amazighen (Berber) traditions and Western and global influences. At the same time, the monotony of repetitive patterns and the fabric's resemblance to standard hospital linens, evoking a sterile room, reminds viewers of a constructed space and, thus, ideas of revision and invention.

Essaydi's conversation with and contestation of the tropes and codes of nineteenth-century European Orientalist painting is the subject of this chapter. The goal is to highlight the long-lasting effects of the colonial gaze on Maghrebi women's self- and collective representation and how their works participate in reconfiguring the postcolonial canon. As her images of Moroccan women circulate through prestigious institutions worldwide and are easily accessible to a global audience through the Internet, Essaydi's photography urges us to rethink the intersection of the postcolonial condition and gender in the context of the mass circulation of images in the age of globalization. Like many women artists originating from North Africa and the Middle East working in the West, Essaydi occupies the paradoxical position of cultural interpreter and insider/resister.