Painters have always managed to channel even the most fantastic themes into convincing pictures. The Orient, the harem, the odalisques – inaccessible places and figures – fired the imagination of European artists since the 18th century like almost no other subject. It is precisely their mysterious nature that fuelled artists’ desire to give valid form to something that could never be properly verified. Even if the various scenes consisted of an assemblage of miscellaneous objects in a studio, a unified artistic style could lend them homogeneity and place each solution within the genealogy of, and competition with, other, similarly convincing pictures.

As Matisse was painting one Odalisque after the other in the twenties, the long history of painters communicating and competing with another via an erotic and feminine Orient seemed to be slowly coming to an end. But in 1955, at the death of Matisse, Picasso, too, prepared to leave his mark on this history of artistic woman-trading: »When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques« (which he in his turn had inherited from Delacroix and Ingres), Picasso remembered, and, in his numerous paraphrases of »The Women of Algiers«, arranged a last encounter between the styles and motifs used by the masters of the oriental genre.

In the realism of photography, the Western dream world of the harem seemed to have become brittle even earlier on. A photo from 1928 hanging in the exhibition »Harem Fantasies and the New Scheherezades« in Barcelona right next to Matisse’s »Odalisque in Red Trousers« shows the painter as an elegantly dressed elderly gentleman in painter’s pose in his studio. He is looking straight into the camera, very much the self-confident artist. Next to him, somewhat in the background and surrounded by all sorts of decorative frippery, a model decked out in orientalistic garb is lying on the sofa. Here, one sees all the various props used in combination to produce pictures of the Orient, as well as the stage techniques (curtain pulls, lighting appliances attached to primitive leads, etc.) employed for the same purpose. The most disconcerting element in this photograph is, however, the Odalisque herself, who is regarding the painter from the back. Her hairdo, make-up and outfit seem to belong, not to the timeless world of painting, but to that of early Hollywood films. Paramount, Universal and Foxfilms were the real heirs to the Odalisques and harems. However, their bombastic productions administered this inheritance more in the spirit of orientalistic salon painting.

Besides medial cross-connections such as these, the exhibition is also frequently concerned with highlighting contrasts between Western fantasies and social realities in the East. The rare photographic documents of a 19th-century Persian harem, which seem as far away as can be from all fanciful visions, are one example of this. Another is to be found in the section with the rather contrived title »Matisse and Ataturk«, which contrasts the women playing an emancipated role in politics and society under Kemalism in Turkey with the Western picture of imprisoned women reduced solely to their bodies. This section is due to the curator’s memory of her first encounter with the »Odalisque in Red Trousers« in the Centre Pompidou and her astonishment at the year of its creation, 1921, in which Kemal Ataturk had guaranteed women’s rights, while harems had been banned even in Turkey by 1909. »I simply couldn’t understand how a Western painting (…) could still keep Turkish women enslaved while, in reality, Turkish women were starting remarkable careers in politics and other professions«, writes Fatima Mernissi in her book »Harem. Western Fantasies – Eastern Reality«, whose ideas pervade the entire exhibition.

[b]Scheherezade goes West[/b]

Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist and author, curated this exhibition on art, cultural history, interculturality and intersexual relations for the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. The exhibition follows on from her publications on these topics, about which she has been writing for many years. It is characterised by a mixture of passion and study of sources, as well as by its equally critical stance both towards the balance of power in Islamic societies and distorted Western images of the Orient. Mernissi’s project is informed neither by mere accusation nor by tendentious euphoria. Rather, it provides the building blocks for more sophisticated views. The curator says the sweeping success of eloquent, educated women on relatively new TV stations like Al-Jazeera provided the concrete background for the angle taken by her exhibition. From this success, she deduces a new order of traditional gender relations in »digital Islam«, one which, she says, can be derived from ancient Arabic images of women – even if these are images of repression.

The historical part starts in the early 18th century with several first editions of »Tales of a Thousand and One Nights« (1704 French; 1711 German), and immediately raises the question of what it was that happened in the course of these translations that was to influence the Western picture of the Orient, and particularly of oriental women, in such a profound and lasting way. Fatima Mernissi sees the main cause in the reinterpretation of Scheherzade from a subversive protagonist into a passive object of erotic projections. This young Persian woman - who, according to the story, succeeded, by summoning up all her powers of imagination and eloquence, in preventing her murderous husband from carrying out further atrocities against women and persuading him to set her free – serves women in the Arab world as a figure of identification for their own efforts at self-liberation and represents a threatening, yet fascinating subject of transgression to the male imagination. Yet in Western translations, she is stripped of her intellectual capabilities and degraded to become the seductive entertainer of a ruler.

The primary lines along which the material in the exhibition is organised are a result of the divergence of these conceptions of role. On the one hand, it traces how, in Western literature and art, the harem became the epitome of the European desire for difference, to a realm of indulgence and uninhibited sensual pleasure, while the impossibility of actually entering such a female domain made a repeated reformulation of previous representations and reports almost inevitable. In this regard, the moments in which arguments in favour of authentic depictions of harems are presented and taken up are particularly instructive. One example is the letters of Lady Montagu, published in 1763. As the wife of the English ambassador to the Ottoman court, she was able to enter this forbidden world and capitalise on the fact that she had seen it with her own eyes, while, at the same time, she did not hesitate to use similar descriptions from the »1001Nights« to confirm her observations. Montagu’s harem, populated by idle Graces – »I am sure the coldest, most strait-laced prude on Earth could not have looked at them without thinking of something that could not be spoken of« - who brought to her mind memories of pictures by the Old Masters (and thus could become an ideal reference for Ingres), in the end became for her the absurd ideal of the most carefree life for women in the world.

[b]A prison disguised as a palace[/b]

On the other hand – and this is probably its most important achievement – the exhibition aims to contrast the more or less bombastic eroticisms of Western orientalism with the picture of the harem in the Arab-Islamic world. In opposition to the opulence and pomposity of the European paintings, the miniature paintings (15th-18th century) from India, Persia, Turkey and the Arab countries speak a language of poetry, love and politics. It is not that eroticism and sexuality are cut out; but they are only an integral component of stories that are about many other things as well. The imagination of the Moslem painters, who had just as little access to harems as their Western counterparts, is influenced by stories handed down orally by strong women who got around the law and those with power by cheating on their masters, running away, and seeking self-determination. This made it clear to them that the harem was a space of imprisonment, a space suffused by power of authority and violence, which is surrounded by walls and guards in order to maintain an order that is threatened from the inside. The lascivious nudes of the Western harem hardly play any role here. The women – they often have names – are active; they go riding, shooting, and are involved in relationships – whether ones that accord to the harem hierarchy or those that go beyond it. Whereas the gaze of Western painters is voyeuristically directed at the body, these miniatures, which rarely show the women on their own, express feelings of male fear and endangerment, but also of sympathy. While, in orientalistic harems, men are mostly left out of the picture, the oriental pictures show them as lovers or betrayed lovers, or at any rate as involved in intersubjective processes of negotiation.

[b]New Scheherezades[/b]

If the old pictures and stories tell us of the transgressive potential of the oppressed (i.e. the women and those who identify with them), fundamentalists today are again busy censoring them. Fatima Mernissi’s exhibition therefore closes with a section on contemporary art by Arab, Islamic women; it presents their revolt against the power of the sex/gender system as a revival of Scheherezade’s subversive creativity. Besides well-known artists like Shirin Neshat, Ghada Amer and Zineb Sedira, this section, curated by Rose Issa, presents a selection of works that is convincing both in its focus on the social legacy of the harem as a symbolic order and on that of the orientalistic construct. Susan Hefuna (Egypt/Germany) presents the barred window as a symbolic border through which the woman assigned to the house (odalisque, i.e. »woman of the room«) sees the outside world, while it often seemed to Western painters and photographers to be the epitome of oriental decorative art. In 1989, Jananne Al-Ani (Iraq) translated Ingres’s »Turkish Bath« into a pile of fruits ready to be eaten, a still rather bold approach, while, in her video installation »A Loving man« (1996-99), she achieves a wonderful update of the female narrative space that so many women authors have cited as a place of counter-culture opposed to official written Islamic law. On five monitors arranged in a circle, the artist, her mother and her sisters tell the story of a man they loved and lost; it is never made clear in what relationship he stood to the women. As the story develops, however much it may affect them, the relationship increasingly shifts to being that between the women themselves; their extremely sympathetic, direct reactions to one another keeps the seriousness of the subject increasingly at bay. In her »atmospheric« portraits of women, Shadi Ghadirian (Iran) articulates the contradictions of a modernised society under the anachronistic terror regime of a theocracy against the historical background of 19th-century studio photography. Her veiled women always open a window on the world beyond their forced immobility, whether through a newspaper, a radio or a Pepsi can. Almost as a counter-theory to this, Nadine Touma (Lebanon) follows the way limitations on a woman’s freedom of movement are extended to the streets of the cities in her work »Cairo, Street Courtship«. This sound installation superimposes Arab pop songs over everyday scenes of women being harassed in the public space, establishing a vocabulary that alternates between poetry and symbolic force in a fascinating manner.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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