Not Given: Talking of and Around Photographs of Arab Women
SF Camerawork
San Francisco, CA
1 March – 26 May 2007

by Tonya Warner

Culled from the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, the latest show in the main gallery of SF Camerawork aims to dispel stereotypes of Arab women as well as the disconnect between image and language and the authority of classification systems. Curators Dore Brown and Isabella Massu, both living in Marseille at the time, were inspired to start this project by the controversy surrounding the ban of headscarves in schools in France, and the misrepresentations of Arab culture in the media at the time. Dedicated to the collection and preservation of images of the Arab world, not only does the Foundation have such a wide range of images that effectively undermine any stereotypes, but a particular classification system utilizing multiple keywords relating to subject and purpose. The curators allowed their fascination with these keywords to dictate the structure of the exhibition, which took on three parts: “disguise”, “woman” + other keywords, and “woman” or “man” + keywords relating to the body.

“Disguise” here refers to the “disowning of one’s representation for another” and features portraits of adults and children taking on various guises through the use of costumes and props. There is something so familiar yet so foreign about the photographs of children – the appeal of having an image of your child dressed in a military uniform or as a priest seems so unconnected to contemporary American society that these images come across as almost kitsch. Yet, there remains the universal and timeless appeal of playing dress-up and of taking on an alternate persona.

The other two sections of the exhibition involve projected image slide shows that also include audio, echoing throughout the gallery, of people reading keywords related to the images in languages that are not their native tongue, in many cases, French. I feel that the curators tried too hard to show the disconnect between image and language; having the keywords read in languages that the visitor most likely does not know does not reinforce their arbitrariness any more than the images themselves do - the point would have been better made had they allowed the images to speak for themselves.

The display method seemed very much to be trying to turn the space into the semblance of a larger museum, including wall texts with quotes from the cannon of Western intelligencia, which, along with awkward space breaks, effectively served to destroy a certain intimacy that should be present in such a small space. There was much that unfortunately serves to distance the visitor from the material, not the least the babble of language in the space. Rather than contextualizing the images, the audio seems to exoticize the photographs, maintaining a divide between Arab and Western culture. Perhaps what instead needs to be emphasized is our shared human tendencies that are expressed within the framework of cultural specificities.
Most of these images are quite interesting and each serves to invite narratives beyond the cold keywords for which they were selected. The viewer inevitably begins to invent what they do not and can not know, to fill in the spaces between cultures and languages. This show does effectively dismiss stereotypes – showing us Arab women are far more than a Burka – however, all of the images are antique. Their age seems to make them doubly fascinating – not only are we looking at a different culture but a different time. However, as we all know, there have been serious political and cultural upheavals in the Middle East since these photographs were made and we are really at a loss connecting them to contemporary attitudes. Like the gaps in language and culture that this show teeters of the brink of falling through, the gap of time also seems to leave the curators’ asserted mission half done.

http://www.sfcamerawork.org/press/press_not_given.html
http://www.fai.org.lb/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3325573.stm

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