»To veil or not to veil« is a question Muslim schoolgirls see themselves compelled to face following the definitive ban on headscarfs at French schools, as did American Muslim women who saw themselves exposed to Islamophobic attacks after September 11. The »choice« between being veiled or going bareheaded as a question of the cultural and political position of women is fundamentally as old as the collision between Islamic societies with European colonialism. And, since then, the question of the veil has been one that ideologically obscures other more important issues. If we think back to the argument about the »liberation « of Afghan women in George W. Bush’s operation »Enduring Freedom«, the observation made by the Egyptian feminist Malak Hifni Nasif one hundred years ago – that focusing on the question of the veil was merely a »diversionary tactic« - still seems very relevant today. From this viewpoint, the talk about the veil as a symbol of the repression of women does not just take the place of social and political reforms to improve conditions for women: its discursive prominence is also determined by the West, frequently taken up by Western-oriented, upper-class men who want to fight against the alleged »backwardness« of their culture (and thus of their women). Diversionary tactics aimed at redirecting attention from the political level to that of dress regulations, whether in the Persia of Reza Shah or in present-day Europe, where it is often the most conservative men who become feminists on the issue of veils, have taken on a variety of historical forms, yet at the same time show the constancy of symbolic struggles that are fought via the bodies (and bodily coverings) of women.

Is there any other cultural sign in Western media and discourses that is as omnipresent, as easy to instrumentalize and as little understood in its variety of meanings as the veil/headscarf, about which everyone has something to say? Making such an ideologically fraught symbol of social, cultural and political struggles the subject of an exhibition increases the potential danger that is anyway inherent in attempts to replace false images with different ones. However, »Veil« is a convincing demonstration that it is possible to throw oneself into the deep water of stereotypes while still providing anchorage for discriminating types of navigation, because, although a wide historical and motivic spectrum of veiling practices is presented, the exhibition avoids any kind of historical-sociological survey, or, at least, only provides the outlines of one in an informative accompanying catalogue. »Veil« is an exhibition that has developed directly from the work of two culturally »translated« artists, Zineb Sedira and Jananne Al-Ani: that is, from many years of artistic and practical engagement with cultural differences, their symbolizations, their fixed discursive formations and the possibilities of their renegotiation. On the basis of such work, the curators could develop, together with the London Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), a project that rejects any polemical approach or »political« packaging, focusing instead on the eloquence of aesthetic productions whose quality lies less in their desire to make statements than in the opening of windows onto the multidimensional nature of the veil under differing conditions.

In view of the fixed notions that generally prevail, the exhibition primarily aims to complicate matters. This can already be seen in the provocative selection of the few non-contemporary works. The photographs of Morocco taken by the French psychiatrist Gaetan de Clérambault provide a Western view of oriental women that diverges from the orientalistic mainstream of his time, the early 20th century, as he is interested in the clothing and the way it is handled, not in what is behind it, however it is imagined. Clérambault, who had already examined the relationship of women to textiles in theoretical studies, may – without its being explicit – have had something like a language of the veil in mind, a rhetoric of the »covering« as a female form of communication. At any rate, the women seem – for all their enigmatic appearance – like interpreters of a convention, making these photographs early evidence (in the West) of the subtle performative dimensions of social contact in Islamic societies, which operate with the gender-specific regulation of verbal language and eye contact as well. The famous »Femmes Algériennes«, taken in 1960 by Marc Garanger on French military service, are the antithesis of the respectful interest shown by Clérambault, representing a counter-pole of colonial brutality and its policy of making visible the invisible. Garanger’s frontal »portraits«, made for use in identity papers, of women who have been forced to remove their veils demonstrate like almost no other document the close relationship between the will to rule and politics regarding women. Shortly before Garanger’s photos were taken, Frantz Fanon had expressed the political doctrine of the French colonial authorities in clear words: »If we want to destroy the structures of Algerian society and thus its ability to offer resistance, we must first of all take control over the women; we must find them behind the veil, where they hide themselves, and in the houses, where they are kept out of sight by their husbands.«

The colonial force that Garanger’s pictures continue to emanate, the abuse of their subjects, makes the display of these photos among art works rather controversial, as became clear at a discussion in Oxford, when a young black woman criticized them as a continuation of the abuse. Indeed, these pictures could have been »framed« with slightly more awareness, and it seems problematic to aestheticize them in relatively large, new copies. In a seemingly paradoxical way, however, it ties in with the curators’ intention of de-victimizing Islamic women to see the failure of these visual politics of conquest in the facial responses of the de-veiled women to this extreme combination of representation and power. With this physical uncovering, the imperial gaze encounters, in these still inaccessible faces, the potential for resistance that Gillo Pontecorvo depicts so clearly in his film »The Battle of Algiers« (1965). This full-length doc/fic, made with amateurs and real liberation fighters, seems extremely topical in its contrast of quasi-legitimate operations carried out by the foreign rulers and terrorist methods of resistance. For »Veil«, the most interesting thing is the role of the women and the function of the veil in the struggle for liberation. Here, »Battle of Algiers« distinguishes between at least three phases that follow one another in relatively rapid succession. While the wearing of the veil is at first seen as a rejection of colonialism, as the insistence on cultural tradition, a phase of strategic Westernization follows to allow the women from the resistance to moved unnoticed through European areas and deposit their bombs there. When police controls then start to apply to everyone, re-veiling gains a new function as a method for concealing weapons and explosives carried directly on the body. All these changes in women’s appearance were accompanied by corresponding acts of solidarity among non-militant Algerian women as well. In a completely different context – the USA after September 11 -, there were similar demonstrative gestures. While religious authorities exempted women who normally wore the headscarf from doing so in view of the threat they were facing, many women who had never worn a veil put one on in a gesture of solidarity with those of their sex that had become targets of hostility on the grounds of their appearance.

The curators themselves have contributed restrained, poetic video projections to their exhibition. In »Silent Sight« - a video showing only a woman’s eyes -, Zineb Sedira reconstructs memories of her Paris childhood in the Algerian community, memories that revolve around the relationship of the girl to her veiled mother, visual distance and emotional closeness, the fear of mistaking or losing her mother when away from home. The spoken text ends with sentences about alienation and belonging: »I think I go used to it. She felt protected by it. It was part of her home, my home.« Jananne Al-Anis’ »Untitled« shows the picture of a woman who has leant her head forwards to brush her hair. Paradoxically, the hair that the veil is meant to conceal takes the place of the latter; it hides the face and draws attention to the action of the hands. This seems to strive for a formalization, a visual version of the idea of covering separated from the material veil.

In an abstract way, an idea is addressed here that crops up repeatedly in the exhibition: the question of equivalents of and variations on the distinction between private and public identity that is inherent in the veil motif. This is also the case with the »Me« videos by Ghazel: short sequences that, often in a humorous, ironic way, show the artist in her chador doing all sorts of activities, both in Iran and in the West. Whether she is cooking, ice-skating, mowing a lawn, posing in the chador as a lascivious model or using it practically as protection against the weather, the veil becomes an everyday, multifunctional object dependent on context for its meaning. While some scenes express the contradictions between a modern lifestyle and religiously motivated dress regulations, others emphasize the ability to act, creativity and room for interpretation within the framework of these regulations. Emily Jacir’s »From Paris to Riyadh (Drawings for my Mother 1998-2001)« also addresses translations carried out by female subjects in the transitional spaces of different societies. With these drawings, Emily Jacir remembers one of her mother’s habits that she observed as a child: for years, when sitting in planes, her mother used to colour over in black the naked parts of the body in Western fashion magazines in order to get them past the Saudi Arabian censors. Here, Jacir contrasts two regimes of the gaze that differ from one another in their judgement of visibility – by demanding or forbidding it – but converge in their attempts (commercial or religious) to standardize the notion of feminity.

While in these works the negotiation of cultural and sexual differences is anchored in personal, biographical contexts, more direct approaches such as the huge photo of a veiled Statue of Liberty by the Moscow AES art group make a rather heavy-handed impression. As a third variant, alongside Mitra Tabrizian’s panorama about the changes in Iran in the past century, there stands a large photographic work by Faisal Abdu’Allah, in which Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is presented in new two versions. Both feature the same black protagonists, some of them armed; in one version they are clothed in »traditional Arabic« style, in the other, in American gangsta-rap style. Here, Christian-Western iconography is referred back to its veiled oriental roots and connected with Afro-American provocations of a white cultural hegemony. By virtue of the fact that the costuming of both groups is brought into line with the multicultural chic of advertising and the media, Abdu’Allah’s photos bring together images that threaten Western values and their simultaneous compatibility with capitalism.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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