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Indelible
The Photographs of Lalla Essaydi
October 10, 2008–January 25, 2009
 Through her thought-provoking photographs, Moroccan-born artist Lalla Essaydi confronts the issues of confinement and repression experienced by many women in Islamic societies. The women depicted in her images, many of whom are family members dressed in traditional attire, are covered with calligraphic writing. These words break the expected silence, telling stories that speak of Essaydi’s thoughts and experiences, caught between the east and the west, the past and the present.
Organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts.
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery Exhibition Sponsor:
Welling LaGrone and Morgan Keegan
Location: Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery
Image: Lalla Essaydi. Converging Territories #10, 2005. Chromogenic print, 48 x 60 in. Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York
Recommended reading:
Amanda Carlson and Lalla Essaydi, Lalla Essaydi: Converging Territories (New York: Powerhouse Books, 2005).
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 (1976): 875–93.
Fereshteh Daftari, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006).
Joan DelPlato, Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800–1875 (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickenson University Press, 2002).
Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East 1860–1950 (London: Quartet Books, 1988).
Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America (May 1983): 118–31; 187–191.
Venetia Porter, Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East, exh. cat. (London: The British Museum, 2006).
Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
Barbara Thompson, “Decolonizing Black Bodies: Personal Journeys in the Contemporary Voice,” in Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body, exh. cat. (Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2008), 279–311.
Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art, ed. David A. Baiey and Gilane Tawadros (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London, Institute of International Visual Arts, 2003).
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