Auction details
March 9th Fine art sale.
offered by
924 ne 20th ave
Ft. Lauderdale., FL 33304 
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"My photographs are about the women subjects' participation in contributing to the greater emancipation of Arab women, while at the same time conveying to an outside audience a very rich tradition of practice, relationships, and ideas that are so often misunderstood and misrepresented in the West," says Essaydi. Lalla Essaydi's photographs deal with a rebellion against the limited domain of the female within Islamic traditions. As noted in Nazar: Photographs from the Arab World (Aperture, 2005), according to Islamic tradition, the street is the domain of men, and women are condemned to live indoors. Behind closed doors, they are nothing more than decoration, suggests Essaydi, a situation she that she vividly represents in Converging Territories, which appeared in the spring 2005 issue of Aperture magazine alongside a text written by Isolde Brielmaier. Essaydi places Islamic women in isolated spaces and literally decorates them with texts written in henna. The texts-a reversal of the silence of their isolation-give the women a voice, with which they can speak to the space and to one another. The rebellious character of the photographs is magnified by the fact that within Islam calligraphy cannot be practiced by women. Converging Territories, #30 was photographed in the house where women and girls from the artist's family were locked up, sometimes for weeks, when they transgressed the rules of Islam. Essaydi herself was sent to this space as a youth; escorted by silent servants, she would be left alone for up to a month. As Isolde Brielmaier notes, "her intention and introspection are evident in her photographs: we see Essaydi turning 'space' into something more than just the delimited enclosures of that house of her childhood." Brielmaier goes on to say that "at a time when many images in circulation portray Arab people in increasingly negative ways, Essaydi reclaims and reconsiders ideas of what it means to be Arab and female on her own terms." Lalla Essaydi (b. 1956) was born in Morocco and lives in New York City. She attended L'École des Beaux Arts in Paris, in the early 1990s, and received her BFA from Tufts University in 1999. Essaydi received an MFA from Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2003. Her work has been included in numerous shows such as Nazar: Photographs from the Arab World, which was organized by the Noorderlicht Photofestival and opened in New York. Essaydi is represented in New York by the Laurence Miller Gallery. PLEASE NOTE: * THIS AUCTION STARTS ON SUNDAY MARCH 9, 2008 AT 11:30 A.M. EST. ImagesClick on thumbnails to see larger images:
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