Les Femmes du Maroc: Grande Odalisque
Artist: Lalla Essaydi (Moroccan, b. 1956)
Date: 2008
Dimensions:
H: 50 in. (127 cm); W: 60 in. (152.4 cm)
Medium: Chromogenic print
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: Gift of The Georgia Welles Apollo Society
Object number: 2011.8
Label Text:"In my art, I wish to present myself through multiple lenses—as artist, as Moroccan…as traditionalist, as Liberal, as Muslim. In short, I invite viewers to resist stereotypes."
--Lalla Essaydi
Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi’s series of photographs Les Femmes du Maroc (“Women of Morocco”) responds to the West’s perception of Muslim women through the lens of 19th-century Orientalism, in which European artists treated Near Eastern and North African cultures as colorful, exotic, and sensual. Muslim women are presented as sexually passive members of harems in images such as Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814), from which Essaydi took the pose for Toledo’s photograph.
Essaydi’s “Grande Odalisque” (concubine) is draped in white mourning fabric rather than nude, and her gaze is more suspicious than inviting. Every surface, including her skin, is scrawled in henna with Arabic calligraphy—excerpts of musings on personal freedom, identity, and memory from Essaydi’s own journals. Essaydi’s use of calligraphy—a religiously charged Islamic art form typically reserved for men—creates a powerful statement as the silent woman is clad in words and thoughts that her society traditionally does not permit her to express.
--Lalla Essaydi
Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi’s series of photographs Les Femmes du Maroc (“Women of Morocco”) responds to the West’s perception of Muslim women through the lens of 19th-century Orientalism, in which European artists treated Near Eastern and North African cultures as colorful, exotic, and sensual. Muslim women are presented as sexually passive members of harems in images such as Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814), from which Essaydi took the pose for Toledo’s photograph.
Essaydi’s “Grande Odalisque” (concubine) is draped in white mourning fabric rather than nude, and her gaze is more suspicious than inviting. Every surface, including her skin, is scrawled in henna with Arabic calligraphy—excerpts of musings on personal freedom, identity, and memory from Essaydi’s own journals. Essaydi’s use of calligraphy—a religiously charged Islamic art form typically reserved for men—creates a powerful statement as the silent woman is clad in words and thoughts that her society traditionally does not permit her to express.
DescriptionChromogenic enlargement print mounted to aluminum and protected with Mactac luster laminate
Not on view
In Collection(s)