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Veil
by Reina Lewis
The Preface to the Institute of International Visual Arts exhibition:
Veil
The veil is an item of clothing dramatically overburdened with competing
symbolism. This publication offers a welcome chance to address the gap
between individual experiences of veiling and its complex and contested
status in a variety of public arenas. In an agenda-setting selection,
this project unites historical material, personal accounts and critical
writing with contemporary visual art to show how the heterogeneous use
of veiling, as dress act and visual trope, is endlessly repositioned by
changing world events and constantly reframed by the nuanced shifting
responses of veiling communities.
For women who wear it and artists who represent it, the veil is a garment
whose meaning cannot be contained. It is a garment fought over by adherents
and opponents, many of whom claim that their understanding of the veil’s
signiÄcance is the one and true meaning. But as this project demonstrates,
if the secret imagined to lie behind the veil reveals one thing, it is
that it cannot be contained within a single truth, experience or understanding.
Instead, the veil emerges as a form of clothing that is rooted in speciÄc
historical moments and locations; its depiction is similarly contingent
and its adoption, adaptation and rejection is always itself relational.
For the West, long obsessed with seeing behind the veil, the veil stands
for the fantasised absolute divide behind East and West. Within a binarised
worldview, penetrating behind the veil is the key to the mysteries of
the East and a route to the penetration of territory (symbolic and literal).
Seen often as proof of the oppression of Muslim women or as a marker of
cultural difference in need of ‘toleration’, the veil has
always and continues to excite strong reactions and counter-reactions.
For women who wear the veil, or who come from veil-wearing societies even
if they themselves do not veil, Western attitudes (and their local take-up)
cannot be avoided. But wearing a veil is a dress act whose level of volition
or compunction varies for each community and for each woman. Moreover,
in the space of a single woman’s lifetime, the reasons that affect
her decision to cover herself and the ways in which this is achieved can
vary in response to personal, geographical, social and political events.
Negotiating with local, national or diasporic community gender systems
is never an isolated event when the Ägure of the veiled woman is fought
over as emblematic of whole societies.
Today the veil is almost always regarded as an Islamic institution and
is often claimed as such. Though it is now predominantly associated with
Muslims and Islam, in the past veiling was a social practice shared by
many populations in the Middle East and North Africa, where to veil spoke
of status rather than religion. Like the harem system’s division
of space, the veil was part of a system of gender seclusion that impacted
more on the rich than the poor, more on the urban than the rural and that
co-opted men into reciprocally modest behaviours. But these practices
never occurred in isolation and changes in veiling habits came about and
come about not only in relation to local developments but also through
interaction with the West. The emergence of local forms of modernity and
postmodernity marked by the engagement (forced and voluntary) with Western
ideologies, markets and cultural forms, produces shifts in the perceived
local and international signiÄcance of the veil. Standing as a beacon
of tradition or an emblem of progressive modernity, the veiled or unveiled,
de-veiled or re-veiled woman has been a feature of divergent struggles
over decolonisation, nationalism, revolution, Westernisation and anti-Westernisation.
In all of these developments women’s agency has been central as
they struggle to deal with the myriad ways in which the Ägure of woman
becomes symbolic for all sides of political debate. Yet the veil is often
read by the West as evidence of the very denial of women’s agency,
or is over-in?ated into the most important feminist struggle. But, in
fact, for many women the requirement to veil is often the least of their
problems in the face of economic and social deprivation. In other instances,
women’s veiling is strategic, providing an alibi for behaviours
outside the home that would otherwise be deemed gender subversive. Though
the potential liberation afforded by veiling is recognised by some earlier
Western travellers, the myth that seclusion equals subordination continues
to structure attitudes to veiling in the West and among those postcolonial
regimes characterised by aggressive secularisation. Thus women, in their
public presentation, navigate a complex dialectic of local patriarchies
and international politics.
These loaded social and (sometimes) personal conditions are also the context
within which artists make representations of the veil. In addition, their
work and its reception is bound to be positioned in relation to existing
visual conventions in the depiction of the veil. From Western Orientalist
painting to movies to media current affairs, coverage of the veiled woman
continues to haunt the visual imagination, reincarnated in contemporary
terms that inevitably owe an allegiance to longstanding misapprehensions
about the nature of veiled life. Rather than simply offering a corrective
to this well-established visual iconography, Veil: Veiling, Representation
and Contemporary Art selects work that not only shows the variety of visual
response to veiling, but that also foregrounds the contingency of the
viewer’s interpretation. The different experiences and cultural
and historical knowledges that viewers bring to the artworks discussed
here and seen in the exhibition mean that a number of readings can emerge.
This accommodation of differently constructed interpretive communities
challenges the closing down of meaning that artists from veiling backgrounds
often experience, since diasporic artists, particularly those who feature
the veil in their work, frequently Änd that they are categorised regionally
or exclusively in relation to Islam.
It thus remains a matter of political and cultural urgency to reconceptualise
the economy of multiple gazes that Älter through, slide off and remake
the veil.
Veil:
Veil is a major international exhibition that examines one of the most
powerful symbols in contemporary culture. Twenty artists and film-makers
address the question of the veil in all its complexities and ambiguities,
challenging any single or fixed cultural interpretation. Veil spans the
spectrum of contemporary visual arts practices, with an emphasis on lens-based
work; on one level, the project is an exploration of the roles of photography,
film and video as contemporary tools for addressing notions of the veil.
This emphasis is underpinned by the inclusion of historic and contextual
work. Gillo Pontecorvo's ground-breaking documentary-style film The Battle
of Algiers (1965) is shown alongside the work of lesser known twentieth-century
figures, such as French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan de Clérambault
and the French military photographer of the Algerian War Marc Garanger.
The curators for this project have selected and commissioned works from
a wide cross-section of international artists who challenge an exotic
voyeuristic positioning. Artists include Faisal Abdu'Allah, Kourush Adim,
AES art group, Jananne Al-Ani, Ghada Amer, Farah Bajull, Samta Benyahia,
Shadafarin Ghadirian, Ghazel, Emily Jacir, Ramesh Kalkur, Majida Khattari,
Shirin Neshat, Harold Offeh, Zineb Sedira, Elin Strand and Mitra Tabrizian.
Curated by Jananne Al-Ani, David A. Bailey, Zineb Sedira and Gilane Tawadros,
this is the first project to address the question of the veil from the
vantage point of contemporary visual art practice. An inIVA touring exhibition,
Veil is supported by the Art Council's National Touring Programme in association
with the Iran Heritage Foundation, with additional support from Bernina
Sewing Machines.
remaining exhibitions:
Nov 22 2003 - Jan 25
2004
Modern Art Oxford
tel: +44 (0)1865 722 733
http://www.moma.org.uk
Feb 20 - May 2 2004
Kulturhuset Stockholm
tel: +46 (0)8 508 31 451
For More information: