She Who Tells a Story

In the heart of Washington, DC, in 2016, amid one of the most tumultuous presidential election campaigns in history, the National Museum of Women in the Arts displayed the work of twelve photographers—all women, all born or raised in the Middle East. The exhibit’s title, She Who Tells a Story, is the translation from the Arabic, Rawiya, also the name of the collective of Middle East women photographers founded in 2009. Comprising more than eighty works from the 1990s to the present, the exhibition had originated in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, where it was curated by Kristen Gresh. According to Gresh’s (2013, 35) essay in the accompanying catalog, the show “is an invitation to discover new photography, to shift our perspective, and to open a cultural dialogue that is not centered on conflict and politics, but begins with the art and interwoven histories of a selection of extraordinary photographers from Iran and the Arab world.”

In its gestalt, the show accomplishes these goals, with a few very powerful works and installations. Whether conversations veered away from politics, though, is another matter. As one visitor noted in the comments book at the exhibition, the show represented the viewpoint of the Middle East majority, with no depictions of Israeli Jews, Druze, or Middle Eastern Christians, for example. Similarly, how these artists depicted Islam or the “clash of civilizations,” to use Samuel Huntington’s deeply problematic term, seemed to be the main thrust of the works presented, nudging, if not forcing, the viewer to engage in the extensive controversies surrounding the Islamic faith and Middle Eastern cultures: the hijab, women’s agency, the ravages of endless wars, and hyperaggressive paternalism.

The show is divided into two parts: “Constructing Identities” and “New Documentaries.” In the first category were five artists, Shirin Neshat, Lalla Essaydi, Boushra Almutawakel, Rania Matar, and Newsha Tavakolian. The title of the second category, comprising the remaining seven artists—Nermine Hammam, Rula Halawani, Tanya Habjouqa, Shadi Ghadirian, Gohar Dashti, Jananne Al-Ani, and Rana El Namr—suggested that the appropriation of documentary photography was the expressive idiom of choice. As I wandered through the exhibition space, I found myself repeatedly asking why these artists turned to photography, and why many manipulated the documentary motif. The catalog, wall text, and labels, while excellent in describing biography, technique, and imagery, did not address these questions.

Of the “Constructing Identities” group, several works seemed weaker than the rest. Moroccan-born Lalla Essaydi’s Bullets Revisited #3 (2012), while glowing with golden bullets and replete with stunningly detailed henna markings, positioned an exotic female subject as a passive odalisque on a wedding blanket of arsenal. This conflation of two of the most pernicious—not to mention persistently Orientalist—stereotypes about the Islamic faith seemed to reinforce the denigrating perceptions of those in the West. Of course, sometimes presenting stereotypes initiates dialogue and debate, but in Essaydi’s case the work comes off with a capitalistic slickness, a lack of nuance, that I could not get past. Similarly, Yemeni artist Almutawakel’s Mother Daughter Doll series (2010), in which all three figures in the title are pictured initially in Western dress and headscarves and then progressively become swathed and eventually rendered invisible in black, presents a highly Westernized view of the function of the hijab or niqab. Do such images feed into the viewpoints that women are subjugated or erased as individuals once they don religious garments? Absolutely. While the artist certainly can express her opinion on the polemics of the veil, I felt that her inclusion in the show could not help but rouse political responses. Fortunately, the work of the three remaining artists, Lebanese-born Matar, Iranian-born Tavakolian, and the star of the show, Iranian-American Neshat, offered sophisticated, multivalent, and beautiful counterpoints to the more troubling concerns raised by Essaydi’s and Almutawakel’s photographs. Tavakolian’s Listen series (2010), in which hijab-clad women were individually pictured with their eyes closed and singing in front of a shimmering sequined backdrop, was not only visually stunning in its rich palette and dramatic lighting but also subtle...