Lalla Essaydi’s Work

Classifying Lalla Essaydi’s studio practice as photography overlooks the complex array of production and practice that goes into the pieces such as, performance, textual, participatory, installation, site specific, and relational. She constructs a variety of tableaus...

Works Cited and Suggestions for Further Reading

Benjamin, Roger. Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930. Berkeley: University of California, 2003. Print. Nochlin, Linda. Representing Women. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Print. Lin, Ming. “Writing Women: Interview...

Suggestions for Further Reading

Bailey, David A., and Gilane Tawadros. Veil: veiling, representation and contemporary art.  Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; London, 2003. Batur, Ayşe Lucie. “The Mythology of the Veil in Europe: A Brief History of a Debate”. Comparative Studies Of South Asia,...

The Veil and Essaydi’s Work

Western audiences viewing Essaydi’s photographs of (sometimes) veiled Muslim women will likely bring with them preconceived notions of the veil and what it means to their interpretation of the works.  Essaydi, educated in both France and the United States, is no doubt...