Wavering at the Crossroads of Pain and Progress: Art Exhibit “Breaking the Veils” Reviewed

by CHRISTOPHER PEAK

Decem­ber 2009

Nes­tled in the under­belly of the Yale Divin­ity School lies an insight­ful exhibit: “Break­ing the Veils: Women Artists from the Islamic World,” which will be dis­played at Yale until Decem­ber 11^th as part of the show’s three-year US tour.  The show offers a wide range of artis­tic styles: from pho­to­re­al­is­tic paint­ings and can­did pho­tographs with expressly polit­i­cal aims to more abstract arrange­ments, such as Suha Shoman’s The Leg­end of Petra (1992), one of the first paint­ings to incor­po­rate sand as a medium along with oil and acrylic.  These pieces incon­spic­u­ously line the hall­ways, so that the exhibit is frag­mented by door­ways lead­ing to class­rooms and offices— a strange contrast.

The exhibit is com­posed of the work of fifty-one women from twenty-one dif­fer­ent Islamic coun­tries.  These pow­er­ful pieces are both visu­ally and con­cep­tu­ally strik­ing.  As the state­ment on the wall at the begin­ning of the exhibit claims, “Art tran­scends dif­fer­ences of cul­ture, his­tory, gen­der, and reli­gion.”  The art cre­ates a win­dow into a dif­fer­ent cul­ture, illu­mi­nat­ing the feel­ings of a group of peo­ple who are often mis­un­der­stood, espe­cially after the 2001 ter­ror­ist attacks of 9/11.

In its illus­tra­tion of the zeit­geist of the present-day Islamic world, the exhibit presents an ambiva­lent per­spec­tive.  It is a pic­ture of hope for the future advance­ment of women—socially, eco­nom­i­cally, and sexually—but it is tem­pered by a fear of change and a long­ing for the tra­di­tions of the past.  Pales­tin­ian Mounira Nusseibeh’s paint­ing Four Arab Women details this alarm­ing con­tra­dic­tion.  Four women wear­ing deeply tex­tured, faded gold veils, leav­ing only their eyes in view, are hud­dled together, star­ing at a mono­lithic black wall.  These women may be seen as force­fully kept inside, long­ing to see what lies beyond the wall, or retreat­ing, des­per­ately seek­ing pro­tec­tion from the future.

The exhibit itself is a per­for­ma­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the new oppor­tu­ni­ties avail­able to women in Islamic coun­tries.  The role of artist has pre­sented itself as another means for women to break out of tra­di­tional stereo­types, a fact reflected in many of the artists’ explo­ration of ground­break­ing ways to depict their sub­jects. This new free­dom is par­tic­u­larly vis­i­ble in their use of abstrac­tion and expres­sion­ism.  The mod­ernism of Rabha Mahmoud’s vibrantly col­or­ful Oma­niat 3 (1992) depicts life among con­stantly mov­ing women.  The pic­ture itself gives no hint of where these women might be, but the sweep­ing brush­strokes and the vivid col­ors express the move for­ward into the future.

One of the most beau­ti­ful paint­ings is Blue Par­adise by the Iraqi Saud al Attar, which depicts a serene, dream­like scene.  The scene draws on Islamic design, Assyr­ian art, and tra­di­tional folk art, in an expres­sion of the impor­tance of the home­land.  Saud al Attar says that she drew her inspi­ra­tion from the death of her sis­ter in the bomb­ing of Bagh­dad in 1991. Like many of the other artists, al Attar’s story alludes to the vio­lent tragedies that many of these women have endured—tragedies which have lead them to explore issues of tra­di­tion and myth, sex­u­al­ity and law, in an attempt to shat­ter oppres­sive stereotypes.

Break­ing the Veils will be show­ing at Yale through Decem­ber 11. The exhibit is mak­ing a 3-year U.S. tour which runs through May 2011; for loca­tions, visit artreachfoundation.org/veils.

Christo­pher Peak is a fresh­man in Yale College.