Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art.

Veil Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art Edited by David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros

The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2003. 187 pp., 75 illustrations, foreword, artist and author's biographies. Full color. $25 softcover.

Mass media images of veiled Middle Eastern women are circulating at an unprecedented volume since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Europe (particularly France and to a lesser extent Germany) has also revitalized questions regarding national identity and secularism by focusing on the visibility of the Muslim veil and headscarf in European public institutions. The recent project Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art in part counters these particular visual tropes by introducing decidedly different images into the public sphere.

In the last two decades, a body of scholarship and revisionist exhibitions have highlighted the interstices between visual culture and the processes by which cultural boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are created. These critical works have sought to disrupt conventional narratives regarding cultural signs and symbols. By investigating the visual realm, including film, television, advertisements, photographs, and painting, such projects explore the ways in which visual forms operate in their representation of cultural difference. Veil contributes to this larger narrative by examining the cultural politics at work in representations of one of the most well-worn signs of "difference": the Muslim and Islamist veil. Like other paradigmatic symbols essentializing the "other," images of the veil and veiling reproduce imbricated histories of intercultural encounter, negotiation, representation, and domination. Anthropologists, cultural historians, and sociologists utilizing the critical tools of postcolonial theory have already engaged the complex histories and multiple meanings of the veil in Muslim and non-Muslim societies. Yet the vital contribution of Veil is its insistent interrogation and production of ambiguous and contested images.

Veil was published in conjunction with the UK touring exhibition of the same name, which was developed by the artists Zineb Sedira and Jananne Al-Ani and organized under the auspices of inIVA (Institute of International Visual Art) in London. inIVA has spearheaded a number of innovative exhibitions (such as "Faultlines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes" at the Venice Biennale 2003) focusing on the works of artists and scholars from culturally diverse backgrounds and critical perspectives. The editors of Veil, Gilane Tawadros, director of inIVA, and David A. Bailey, a London-based artist, writer, and curator, have brought together a variety of essays, artworks, and archival materials exploring alternative visions of the veil. Indicative of a range of political, social, and ideological positions, the contributors offer multiple readings of the veil, ranging from a focus on its corporeal function in the performance of female identity to its immaterial role as a metaphor for censorship.

Besides the fact that North African artists are also included in Veil, Africanists will recognize the vital aim underwriting this project, since unpacking stereotypical and fetishistic images of Africa is also an important agenda for the field of African art history. Africanists will also find the authors' insights into the mercurial changes in the practice and meaning of contemporary veiling useful for exploring such practices in Muslim African societies. Furthermore, while scholars have explored the social meanings of African traditions of dressing the head (see, for example, Mary Jo Arnoldi and Christine Mullen Kreamer's 1995 exhibition catalogue Crowning Achievements: African Arts of Dressing the Head), this publication raises important issues about the ways in which this meaning circulates across multiple media and contexts. From this perspective, for example, a study of the ubiquitous West African headtie would invite new questions regarding how African modes of dress are represented and consumed by various culture producers and audiences in the West.

The preface by Reina Lewis, whose own research exploring the centrality of gender and sexuality has complicated Orientalist studies, frames Veil as an "agenda-setting" project that "shows how the heterogeneous use of veiling, as a dress act and visual trope, is endlessly repositioned by changing world events and constantly reframed by nuanced shifting responses of veiling communities" (p. 10). According to Lewis, Veil "not only shows the variety of visual responses to veiling, but also foregrounds the contingency of the viewer's interpretation" (p. 14).

In the introduction, Bailey and Tawadros position contemporary artistic practice as potentially subversive and ambiguous rather than "polemical" or "academic" (p. 19). Bailey and Tawadros contend that "[t]he strength and uniqueness of this project lie within the curatorial narrative which repositions the exhibition from the arena of ethnographic survey shows into a contemporary art context...." (p. 19). This celebration of the contemporary art world of course follows a certain understanding of the artist as someone whose ideas, strategies, and work offer a critical lens of the status quo. First developed in context of the historical avant-garde in the West, this position locates artists, such as those selected for this exhibition and catalogue, as critical cultural workers who have the ability to "disrupt the simplistic binaries" (p. 34) through aesthetic means.

From this position Bailey and Tawadros write an insightful narrative, interweaving discussions of specific works of art with analytical concerns regarding the ideological underpinnings of the veil. The authors explore such themes as the Orientalist gaze, Middle Eastern cultural idioms, and the signification of the female body and sexuality in various political, social, and cultural contexts. For example, the work of the AES art group--Mitra Tabrizian, Faisal Abdu' Allah, and Shadafarin Ghadirian--are discussed as ironic references to and evocations of the manipulative power of photography. The authors also explore how the embroidered canvases of Ghada Amer and the photographic works of Shirin Neshat comment on the use of the veiled or unveiled female body in contesting discourses of nationalism, feminism, colonialism, and resistance movements.

Furthermore, the editors have consciously chosen to include excerpts from important texts, such as Franz Fanon's Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1965) and Leila Ahmed's Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (1992), thus providing insight into the changing discourses surrounding the veil. The excerpt from Ahmed's book, titled "The Discourse of the Veil," focuses on colonial-era writings by colonial administrators and Egyptian activists. She shows how Western, Victorian colonial paternalism unfairly judged women's status in Egypt to justify the British "civilizing mission." Her text exposes the hypocrisy of colonial policies toward Muslim women, which on one hand appropriated the rhetoric of Western feminism and on the other hand enforced policies restricting Egyptian women's access to education. Her larger aim is to make a case for the liberation of women in Islamic cultures on their own terms and in their own time, without replicating Western constructs or dictates.

The excerpt by the Martiniquan psychiatrist and revolutionary writer Franz Fanon chronicles his anticolonial position in relationship to his role as an army psychiatrist and later as a participant in the war for liberation in Algeria. His text "Algeria Unveiled," written in 1959, is paired with stills from Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers. Both give insight into the ways in which the veiled woman became a symbol of resistance for various independence movements in Africa and the Middle East. The film stills and Fanon's text celebrate the concrete contribution of Algerian women to the resistance movement and the inability of the French administration to come to terms with Algerian social and political strategies of resistance.

Three other contributing authors speak to the changing position of the veil and veiling in three distinct cultural and political settings. Ahdaf Soueif, the well-known Egyptian-British novelist, relates the complex social and cultural codes attached to wearing the veil or headscarf in Egypt in different historical moments (1923, 1971, 2001) in her piece titled "The Language of the Veil." Her nuanced and personal perspective on the changing relationship Egyptian women have toward the veil highlights the subtle political, social, and class allegiances women project when they choose certain modes of veiling or not veiling. Alison Donnell, a British scholar of postcolonial literature, provides an incisive interrogation of American and European media coverage about Muslim and Islamist women since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Her essay, "Visibility, Violence and Voice? Attitudes to Veiling Post-11 September," emphasizes the new boundaries that have been drawn between "East" and "West" in contemporary political and wartime polemics. These fictionalized boundaries are of course particularly hard to sustain today since the public visibility of Islam and the specific gender, body, and spatial practices underpinning it are becoming more important to European and American Muslims and Islamists as well. Hamid Naficy's contribution, "Poetics and Politics of Veil, Voice, and Vision in Iranian Post-Revolutionary Cinema," draws on his expertise as an art historian and film studies scholar to chronicle the role of women before and behind the camera in the Iranian film industry since the 1978-79 revolution. He considers how filmmakers deal with new political and social rules regulating modesty and gendered segregation and focuses on the works of film directors and multimedia artists, such as Ghazel, who appropriate the veil as a vehicle for critiquing the political establishment in Iran.

Jananne Al-Ani and Zineb Sedira, who cocurated and contributed artworks to the exhibition, also wrote articles for the catalogue. Their essays give provocative insights into in their personal and intellectual engagement with the ideological baggage of the veil and the impact this baggage has on their artistic practice. Al-Ani's contribution, "Acting Out," revisits the work of various turn-of-the-century and colonial-period photographers (from Europe and Iran) and the ways in which their visual legacy has occupied later generations of scholars and artists. The vital questions posed by Sedira's essay, "Mapping the Illusive," are pivotal to understanding the larger implications of the Veil project: "What differences are there between the physical veil in Muslim culture and the mental veil in Western culture?" (p. 5), "How do I write about the subject of the veil in the West without worrying that my writing reinforces Orientalist fetishes, commodifying experience?" (p. 63).

Another key question would be to ask what the implications are of producing images and imaginings of the veil in the realm of the European art museum (with its particular audiences). Furthermore, what are the complex ideological shifts at play when images of the veil are aestheticized in contemporary art making processes? These issues of contingency and responsibility are a strong undercurrent in Veil, but never addressed directly. Of course, the realm of the contemporary art object/project is equally rife for consumption and can also lead to rarified conceptions and fetishizations. Yet the authors do attend to the multivocality of representations of the veil in the wider contemporary social and cultural context. Most importantly, Veil represents a project of cultural intervention by artists and cultural workers. While ambitious and wide-ranging in scope, at its core Veil is a platform from which twenty international artists from Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds respond to and problematize accepted paradigms of interpretation that reduce the veil as a sign of incontrovertible cultural difference.