In Conversation with Lalla Essaydi

Les Femmes du Maroc: Grande Odalisque 2

Q: You were born in Morocco but you are living in the US. How much and in which ways do these opposite cultures mark your works? 
A: As an artist now living in the West, I have become aware of another space, besides the house of my girlhood, an interior space, one of "converging territories." I will always carry that house within me, but my current life has added other dimensions. There is the very different space I inhabit in the West, a space of independence and mobility. It is from there that I can return to the landscape of my childhood in Morocco, and consider these spaces with detachment and new understanding. When I look at these spaces now, I see the two cultures that have shaped me and which are distorted when looked at through the "Orientalist" lens of the West.

Q: “The Orient has helped to define the Europe (or the West)” argued E. Said in his seminal work Orientalism[1], What do you think of this quote in regard to your life?
A: As a Moroccan-born artist who lives in New York and Marrakesh as well as traveling frequently in the Arab world, I have become deeply aware of how the cultures of the so-called Orient and Occident view one another. I have become increasingly aware, in particular, of the impact of Western gaze on Arab culture. Edward Said famously described the dominant Western take on Arab culture in his (ground-breaking) book, Orientalism. Although Orientalism most often suggests a 19^th-century European vision of the East, as a set of assumptions it lives on today: both in the regard of the West and in the way Arab societies continue to internalize and respond to that regard. Because in its early form Orientalism was a literal “vision,” finding expression in the work of Western painters who traveled to the “exotic” East in search of cultures more colorful than their own, I have used it as a point of departure in much of my own work—painting and photography both. The imagery I found in Orientalist painting has resonated with me in tricky ways and ultimately helped me situate my own experience in a powerful visual language. I thought this complex of ideas we call Orientalism, as reflected in my work and the Western painting that inspired it, might serve to ground my remarks.

Q: It is evident that some of your works are a clear allegory to Orientalism, a feminine reinterpretation and a modern point of view – if only for the medium used – of masterpieces such as Ingres (The big odalisque) and Gerome (The guard of the Harem). Are you trying to reconstruct (and/or change) the past through contemporary image? 
A: Orientalism, as I mentioned at the outset of this inverview, has long been a source of fascination for me. My background in art is in painting, and it is as a painter that I began my investigation into Orientalism. My study led me to a much deeper understanding of the painting space so beautifully addressed by Orientalist painters in thrall to Arab décor. For its terrific prominence in these paintings, this décor made me keenly aware of the importance of interior space in Arab/Islamic culture. And finally of course, I became aware of the patterns of cultural domination and predatory sexual fantasy encoded in Orientalist painting.

Orientalism provide a kind of foil for my own work, which sets out to invoke, interrogate, and complicate the Orientalist tradition. In so doing, I hope to make possible, within the projected space of Orientalist painting, a new space, an openness to a new kind of understanding.

Harem #4b

Q: How did – and how does – in your opinion, Orientalism affect Western perception of Islam and the Arab Culture?
A: Interestingly, it is not only the West that has been prevented from seeing Arab culture accurately. How people in the Arab world see themselves has also been affected by the distorting lens of Orientalism. There’s some evidence that the Orientalist perspective has had an impact on the actual lives of men and women, and especially that the rules for Arab women became much stricter as a result of Western influence. When the West portrays Eastern women as sexual victims and Eastern men as depraved, the effect is to emasculate Eastern men, and to challenge the traditional values of honor and family. So Arab men feel the need to t be even more protective of Arab women, preventing them from becoming targets of fantasy by veiling them. The veil protects them from the gaze of Orientalism. While we’ll probably never know whether the return to the veil and the rules that accompany it is a response to Western influence or merely coincidental, it’s hard to believe there’s no relationship.

But by invoking the Orientalist tradition in a way that makes the viewer aware of its inherent assumptions, I hope not to provoke some kind of “blame game” but rather to liberate viewers – Arab and Western alike – from the grip of these assumptions. Furthermore, I am not a sociologist, I am an artist, working from a particular vantage point, and as such hope to give full expression to a uniqueness that I hope will resonate with the uniqueness of each viewer.