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Event and Calendar Listing: Art Exhibitions/Photography/Film
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Not Given: Talking of and Around Photographs of Arab Women
1 March - 26 May 2007
Opening Reception: Thursday 1 March 2007 @ 5 pm
SAN FRANCISCO -- A 1940s Hollywood glamour girl wannabe in Egypt throws a practiced ‘come hither’ look over her bare shoulder at the camera. A serious young Lebanese woman poses for a portrait dressed like an English gentleman in a pinstriped suit. The Arab pop music equivalent of Charo wears a traditional headscarf with a wry expression. These images and more gleaned from the archive of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut are the subject of a fascinating new multimedia installation featuring a soundscape of recorded voices, projected large-scale images and photographic prints entitled Not Given: Talking of and Around Photographs of Arab Women on view March 1 – May 26, 2007 at SF Camerawork. This is the only U.S. venue for this thought-provoking show curated by local art historian and critical theorist Dore Bowen and French media artist Isabelle Massu.
Bowen and Massu were both working in Marseille at a time when the French debate over banning headscarves was at its most heated. They became frustrated by what they saw in the media. “The way Arab women were being represented seemed so simplistic,” says Bowen. “We had the impulse to unpack the glib political statements and see if there was more going on than met the eye.”
Their curiosity led them to the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, a unique organization that locates, collects and preserves the photographic heritage of the Arab world. Most of the collection is from the Middle East. Expecting to find more cliches, the women were astounded by the rich diversity of the collection. In it were people of every social class, era, region, culture and religion. “It instantly shattered any preconceived notions of Arab identity, particularly of women,” says Bowen. “We thought, ‘that really needs to be shown.’”
SF Camerawork executive director Sharon Tanenbaum agrees. “Living here in the U.S., and particularly since 9/11, our viewpoints of the Arab world are very limited to the pictures we see in newspapers, television, and Hollywood movies,” she says. “This installation blows our stereotypes out of the water, showing a completely different side of Middle Eastern photography and Arab women in particular. Here we see them relaxing with friends and family. Many are without veils and some are scantily clad.”
The nature of the Foundation’s online database intrigued Bowen and Massu as well. Like all archives, the photographs had been sorted and tagged according to a set hierarchy of terms related to gender, class and function. As they searched the database, they discovered that many of the images had curious keyword classifications that opened up interesting questions about translation, reductive labeling, the relationship between words and images and the reliability of either to accurately communicate identity.
Not Given: Talking of and Around Photographs of Arab Women presents visitors fascinating opportunities to reflect on these issues and the highly interpretive nature of “viewing” as they experience the installation’s many sights and sounds.
Entering the gallery, visitors encounter a number of photographic prints that fall under the keyword “disguise” in the Foundation’s database. Writing on this subject for Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts, Tarek el-Ariss notes that in Arabic, the term disguise or tanakkur means a disowning of one’s representation for another. Here subjects have adopted or invented an identity – children play as if they were adults, men cross dress as women and women as men. El-Ariss writes that “posing in front of the camera, carrying a fake gun, or putting on a bride’s veil while brandishing plastic flowers constitute sessions of disguise that expose social rituals and disturb their apparent rigidity.”
Further into the gallery, two adjacent screens display images under the keyword “woman” in combination with added keywords such as camel, rifle or yashmak (a narrow veil worn in public by Turkish women). In the process of adding and reinterpreting keywords, the photographs become a contested terrain in which notions of gender, the individual, the collective, the family and cultural value are negotiated via the words used to describe them.
Keywords that relate to the body or gesture searched in combination with the words “woman” and “man” are the sources of the large-scale images projected opposite each other in a darkened gallery. In the juxtaposition, visitors see the expected and unexpected ways selected terms are gendered. Using the term “undressed,” we see a slew of pin up style images of women and one single image of a man lifting his shirt to reveal a long scar from an operation. An accompanying audio component features people reading keywords in a language other than their native tongue.
In another area of the installation, visitors are invited to sit in a comfortable lounge setting to listen to verbal chains of commentary built around a photograph. In these, an Arab woman begins by describing herself in a photograph of her choosing. The next commentator listens only to this description and attempts to imagine the photograph. Then, commentators of both sexes from France, Algiers, Beirut and San Francisco follow each description with their own in a game of telephone in which the original image disappears in the transition. In the previous showing of the installation in Marseille, for instance, an Algerian woman begins by describing a wedding photo and speaks briefly of an unhappy marriage. By the third commentary the perception was that the Algerian woman had been forced into an arranged marriage.
While listening to the audio, visitors can also peruse the shelves of the books found in the lounge, stocked with the resources that Bowen and Massu relied on for the three years of reading and research they did to create the project. This archive of the archive, allows visitors to reflect more deeply on the ideas embedded in the installation.
An issue of the esteemed publication, Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts, accompanies the installation to provide an in-depth exploration of the issues raised in it, with essays by Dore Bowen, Tarek El-Ariss, Arlette Farge, and Paul-Emmanuel Odin. It is available for $8.00 at SF Camerawork.
Public programs related to the installation include a special two-part film screening of “Through Lebanese Eyes: Recent Political Documentaries by Lebanese Women” curated by Irina Leimbacher and presented in partnership with The Arab Film Festival. The program takes place on two Sundays, March 4 and 11 at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. at Artist’s Television Access at 992 Valencia St. in San Francisco. Tickets are $6. Additionally, a panel discussion with the installation’s curators and members of the community takes place on Wednesday, April 25 at 7 p.m. at SF Camerawork.
Not Given: Talking of and Around Photographs of Arab Women opens with a reception on March 1, 2007 from 5-8 p.m. and is on view Tuesdays – Saturdays 12-5 p.m. from March 1 through May 26, 2007 at SF Camerawork, 657 Mission St., Second Floor. Admission is $5.00; $2.00 for students and seniors; free to Camerawork members. For more information, the public should visit www.sfcamerwork.org or call 415.512.2020.
SF Camerawork’s presentation of Not Given: Talking of and Around Photographs of Arab Women was funded in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Columbia Foundation, the LEF Foundation, the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and the San Francisco Arts Commission.
About the Curators
Dore Bowen is an art historian and theorist. She holds a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester and is currently assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at San José State University.Isabelle Massu is a media artist. She is currently teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 12– 5 pm
Camerawork is located at 657 Mission Street @ 3rd Street
Admission is $5 for the public, $2 for students and seniors, and free to SF Camerawork membersJPG images can be requested electronically. Please contact Nina Sazevich, Public Relations, at (415) 752-2483 or nina911@pacbell.net.
About SF Camerawork
Founded in 1974, SF Camerawork encourages emerging and mid-career artists to explore new directions in photography and related media by fostering creative forms of expression that push existing boundaries. Throughout its history, SF Camerawork has nurtured artists, mentored youth and helped make San Francisco a destination for the exploration of photography as an artist’s medium. Its exhibitions are nationally recognized as a focal point for innovation, a pacesetter for new trends in the medium and a launching pad for the careers of young artists. With three galleries and an education center at its new centrally located facility, SF Camerawork is the only non-profit organization in the Bay Area with an exhibition space and educational programs focused exclusively on contemporary photography and related visual image media. It is an accessible venue for people to view exhibitions, meet artists, participate in educational programs, peruse photographic publications, and gather for lectures, screenings, portfolio reviews, and discussions.
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