Hayv Kahraman: ”Telling Tales of Horror with a Demure Grace”

March 19, 2012 By

Hayv Kahraman is an Iraqi artist whose work reflects on issues of gender, looking at the victimization of women during war, and the effects of practices such as honor killings and genital mutilation, as well as alienation, marginalization, and displacement. Kahraman addresses these contemporary issues through paintings which have a classical and timeless feel to them, her delicate and elegant work in tension with the complex issues and painful real-world realities which she often takes as her subject. As the Saatchi Gallery describes her work, “Kahraman tells…tales of horror with a demure grace through her stunningly beautiful paintings.”

Hayv Kahraman, Collective Cut, via Art Slant

Born in Iraq in 1981, Kahraman moved to Sweden while a child, and later moved to Italy, before returning to Sweden in 2006 to study at the University of Umeå, and later moving to the United States. Having taken up oil painting at twelve, she extends her work beyond drawing and painting to sculpture and design, and the stylistic references her works evoke are wide-ranging. Her influences include Persian miniature art, Arabic calligraphy, traditional Japanese prints, art nouveau, and fashion illustrations, and she introduces elements of the uncanny and bizarre as her way of applying “the background of Islamic art and calligraphy to the traditions of western Europe and the Renaissance.” Kahraman’s precise technique and flattened perspective gives her work a minimalist sparseness and a compelling iconic feel, all the more evident in paintings where she employs religious symbolism. In one series, for example she illustrates the scriptural story of the Sacrifice of The Lamb, with the figures recast as women. The title, “Collective Cut,” suggests that the sacrificed lamb “might also be metaphorically understood in relation to the practice of ‘honour’ killings.” In another painting, unambiguously titled “Honor Killings,” she depicts women hanging from a tree, and in another work, she reinterprets matryoshka dolls through an unveiling process.

Kahraman’s characters are often depicted with elongated necks, representing the archetypical image of the swan, emphasized by the way her figures are often caked in a waxen white color, objectified women with expressionless eyes. As one article puts it,

Her women look like Modiglianis, and have that melancholy serenity about them; plaintive, dreamy-eyed and ethereal in their suffering. They are glimpsed behind closed doors, sumptuously arrayed in harems; exquisite creatures wrapped in fine shawls and lounging on rugs.

This description highlights the elements of orientalist imagery blended into Kahraman’s use of fairy-tale and surrealism as codes in her metaphorical representations of women’s struggles, making her work comparable to artists such as Laylah Ali and Shirin Neshat. Kahraman describes the latter as an inspiration and as “a pioneer in her field.” Kahraman goes on to say that “It’s an exciting time for female artists from the Middle East right now. Many are emerging with a powerful visual language and history is being made.”

This raises some of the issues of political agendas, and how artists from the “Middle East” are often brought into the limelight depending on the international interest in certain facets of their subject matter – in Kahraman’s case, her exploration of the “subject of female oppression with particular reference to war in the Middle East and specifically in her home land of Iraq.”

Hanging Sheet, Marionettes Series, via Escape into Life

Kahrman’s series Marionettes could be seen as the embodiment of this theme of women as victims, with their passivity literalized through strings controlling their movements. At the same time, however, Kahraman turns her attention to women as either complicit in or agents of their own repression. In this sense, Kahraman’s work is “a deliberative observation of women being wronged, and women enlisted as agents to perpetuate these wrongs.” Many of her works illustrate an obsession with the maintenance of beauty, with voluntary acts of collective grooming verging on the horrific; images of plucking, waxing, and tweezing become extended into acts of physical mutilation, cutting off tongues and branding, to suit the demands of society or tradition, representing “unflinching depictions of women enslaved to the foibles of the beauty myth.” [Read more...]

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Zenocrate and Zabina in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

February 21, 2012 By

The two parts of Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine, loosely based on the life of  the Central Asian emperor Timur the Lame, tell the story of the Scythian shepherd who becomes a conqueror of kings. Although this play was written in the 1588,  it gives us an insight into representations of Muslim women at the time of writing, and has some relevance for today, as is evidenced by the proliferation of studies of early modern “Turk” and “Moor” plays. As one review of DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production puts it:

Franchelle Stewart Dorn as Zabina, Empress of Turkey, via scene4.com

Tamburlaine’s landscape, brutality, and clash with Moslem countries give currency to today’s American audience who live with involvement in brutal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that impact relations with Iran and other Moslem countries.

Perhaps the most famous line in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, “And shall I die and this unconquered?” encapsulates the story of Tamburlaine’s continuously chasing conquest, “Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms/And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.” As those conquests sweep from central Asia through Persia to Turkey, the play explores not only issues of ambition and hubris, but also appeals to anti-Turkish sentiments felt around Europe at a time when, as Richard Knolles writes, the Turks had “grown to the height of majesty and power, as that it hath in contempt all the rest.”

One of the most interesting aspects of the play is the utilizing of national anxieties reflected in Tamburlaine’s victory over the Turkish Emperor Bajazeth. While Bajazeth proclaims “Now shalt thou feel the force of / Turkish Arms, /Which lately made all Europe quake for fear,” Tamburlaine asserts, “Tush, Turks are full of brags/And menace more than they can perform.”  These dynamics make Tamburlaine a complex text when it comes to the question of how Islam was represented within the human geography of the world on the Renaissance stage, a question which has recently seen a resurgence of interest, but which goes back almost a hundred years to Louis Wann’s ‘The Oriental in Elizabethan Drama’ (1915) and Warner Grenelle Rice’s ‘Turk, Moor, and Persian in English Literature’ (1927).

But Tamburlaine is equally interesting for its construction of gender roles, especially in the first part, given Zenocrate’s transformation from being the daughter of the Sultan and the betrothed of the Prince of Arabia, to being Tamburlaine’s captive, to Queen of Persia. In the beginning, Zenocrate’s speech is a constant reminder of her status, which forms a distinction between her and Bajazeth’s wife, Zabina. As Lamiya Almas points out, while both are captives, “Zabina is an empress by association and not by birth, but Zenocrate, also an empress, is an absolute monarch by birth, and through her marriage Tamburlaine’s territories and hers will be united.”

Soon, Zenocrate begins to compare herself with Juno through her connection with Tamburlaine, retorting: “Call’st thou me concubine, that am betrothed/unto the great and mighty Tamburlaine?” The text seems to offer some autonomy to Zenocrate here, yet this could be seen as underlining Zenocrate’s trophy position. As Mohja Kahf puts it in her book Western representations of the Muslim woman: From Termagant to Odalisque, “Whether wives, mothers, maids or concubines, the women in Tamburlaine are trophies and accessories to men and rarely budge from rather wooden roles.”

There is, however, an openness to other interpretations, depending on whether Zenocrate is portrayed as a dissident voice against violence later on in the play. Some of her lines do conflict with the dominant narrative, in her plea for her father’s kingdom, her grief for the virgins whose execution Tamburlaine orders, and her lament over Bajazeth and Zabina’s suicide. But it could equally be argued that the rise and triumph of Tamburlaine is paralleled by the suppression of Zenocrate, who becomes increasingly silent towards the end of the first part, whether this is interpreted as the “silent treatment” or as Sara Deats sees it, a progression through which Zenocrate, “interpellated into female passivity and silence by the end of Part I, petrifies into the figure of the ideal wife and mother in Part II.”

Is there an aspect of Zenocrate’s portrayal that is specific to the play’s Islamic context? [Read more...]

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Art of Words: Women Calligraphers Then and Now

February 6, 2012 By

A few days ago, Lubna Shaikh posted this calligraphic collage craft idea for children on Suhaibwebb.com, in honor of the remembrance of the birth of the Prophet. Lubna writes that there is a need to “seek creative ways of imparting the knowledge of our deen” to children, to help them cultivate a personal connection with the religion.

Lubna Shaik's Calligraphic Collage, via Suhaibwebb

The connections between calligraphy, education and religion are deep-rooted in Islam, from the first revealed word of the Quran, Iqra (Read). The prophet’s son in law Ali ibn Abi Talib is said to have said, “Teach your children writing and marksmanship” and “Beautiful writing makes the truth clearer.”

In Women’s Roles in the Art of Arabic Calligraphy, Salah al-Din al-Munajjid traces women’s roles in Islamic calligraphy, beginning from the advent of Islam and the role of al-Shifa al-Adawiyah, the woman known as “the first female teacher in Islam” who taught the Prophet’s daughter Hafsa to read and write.

While the art of calligraphy has often been dominated by men, Munajjid tells the stories of women who acheived high standing as calligraphers, many of whom were scholars and poets in their own rights. Women who distinguished themselves in the field include Fatimah bint al-Aqra, who modeled her style on the the famous calligrapher al-Bawwab, and was in turn imitated by calligraphers all over the Islamic world.

Soraya Syed's The Cup of Love via Art of the Pen, inspired by a quatrain from Rumi’s Divan-i Kabir

Another Fatimah (d 966/1558), better known as Bint Quraymazan, copied many books and was herself a scholar, as well as the principal of the Adiliyah Khanqah in Aleppo. Sayyidah al-Abdariyah (d 647/1249) of Granada, knew the Quran by heart and copied Ghazzali’s The Revival of Religious Sciences. Shuhdah bint al-Ubri was a hadith compiler, and was known as Musnidat al-Iraq, the Authority of Iraq. Another woman who copied Qurans was the Cordovan Aisha, who was also a bibliophile and a poet. During the Ottoman period, women calligraphers included Zahidah Salma Khanum; Sharifah Aishah Khanum; Silfinaz Khanum; Faridah Khanum, the Qastumonian; Khadijah Kuzaydah Khanum Celebi; and Nukhah Khanum.

This rich history of women calligraphers is often forgotten today. As David Simonowitz puts it in his article on Muslim women calligraphers, “much research has been conducted on Islamic calligraphy, yet the history of women calligraphers has been largely neglected,” although there is now a concerted effort to record and preserve and pass on this knowledge through efforts such as the International Female Calligraphers Exhibition which was held in Turkey in 2010. The famous Turkish calligrapher and art historian Hilal Kazan, author of Female Calligraphers Past and Present, was a coordinator at the exhibition. Soraya Syed is another calligrapher who received her Islamic Calligraphy diploma in Turkey. Her website Art of the Pen features her work, exhibitions and workshops.  Syed was interviewed by BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour in 2008 as  ”a leading practitioner of the art of Islamic penmanship”, along with Avielah Barclay,  ”unique in being a certified woman Hebrew scribe.” [Read more...]

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Zarina Hashmi: Mapping Home

January 31, 2012 By

Susan Friedman has described the homonym roots/routes as “two sides of the same coin: roots, signifying identity based on stable cores and continuities; routes, suggesting identity based on travel, change and disruption.” I have always visualized veteran artist Zarina Hashmi’s home on wheels as embodying this duality. Like much of her work, her piece entitled I Went on a Journey explores the concept of “home” and self-location. As she puts it, “I make a home wherever I am. My home is my hiding place, a house with four walls, sometimes with four wheels.”

I Went on a Journey by Zarina, image via artasiamerica.org

Zarina Hashmi was born into a Muslim family in Northern India. After marrying a diplomat officer, she traveled widely in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States. Even after making New York her base in the 1970’s, she continued to travel. This restless journeying profoundly influences her work, which bears the influence of Sufi, Zen and Buddhist thought, evoking a range of emotions through an austere and tactile minimalism, using a variety of materials including wood-block prints, sculpture, and papier mâché. Last year, her works were featured at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in “Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940s to Now,” and it has recently been featured at The India Art Fair, 2012 held on 25-29 January.

Quoted in The Times of India, art critic and curator Roobina Karode notes that when Zarina, (who uses only her first name) first came to New York, she “was upset by the fact that American viewers expected her to offer Indian cliches – like vibrant colours and ornamentation. Her sparse, frugal and white canvases were seen as ‘un-Indian’.” The issue of perceptions of authenticity and aesthetics are ever-present. For example, in the same article, Ashok Vajpeyi of Copal Art compares Zarina to Nasreen Mohamedi and argues that “Both Zarina’s and Nasreen’s canvases are very secular. They should not be viewed as Islamic artists.”

However Zarina’s work could only be “uncharacteristic of a Muslim woman artist,” if there is such a thing as art characteristic of Muslim women. Secular and religious, personal and political, words and images, collide in Zarina’s works, such as in Letters from Home where she uses a set of letters written by her sister in Urdu and surimpososes Islamic calligraphy over themes of partition, exile and migration, to capture “everyday life in Pakistan and India from an Islamic perspective at a time when the country was in a transformational state.”

Zarina's Home is a Foreign Place and Blinding Light

Many of her works have titles that evoke thinking about borders, such as Home is a Foreign Place, Dividing Line and Cities I Called Home. In other works, there are spiritual or medidative connotations, such as in her show The Ten Thousand Things which references Ts’en Shen’s words, “When the ten thousand things have been seen in their unity, we return to the beginning and remain where we have always been.” Her work Multiple Silences interlaces image with the Nastaliq calligraphy of Urdu. Another work, a vertical screen gilded with gold leaf, is titled Blinding Light; as Zarina explains, this work was

inspired by the legend of Moses asking God to reveal himself. God warned him that he would not be able to stand the light of his presence but Moses insisted. When God revealed himself Moses fainted and the surrounding hills and bushes burned…

Self Portrait 1 by Asma Ahmed Shikoh, image via nytimes.com

In these and many other ways, Zarina re-interprets artistic and spiritual traditions. As Zarina’s work has evolved over three decades, the themes of displacement, travel and memory that are a recurrent trope of her work have been taken up by a new generation of women artists from the subcontinent, artists including Shabnam Shah, Hamra Abbas, Seher Shah, Shahzia Sikander, Naiza Khan, Huma Mulji, Asma Mundrawala, Aisha Khalid, and Asma Ahmed Shikoh, their work encompasses a wide range of artistic expression ranging from Persian miniatures to black and white iconicity to popular kitsch, yet many draw from tradition to engage with and address contemporary realities. As Amal Allana, director of the Art Heritage Gallery, notes, “there is a large body of women trying to create a new language of modernity from the Islamic background, finding a voice of their own with their own tools.”

 

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“A Country and a Continent”: Fatimah Tuggar and the Politics of Montage

January 17, 2012 By

Fatimah Tuggar is one of the artists Jiwa has discussed, in his article on Imaging, imagining and representation: Muslim visual artists in NYC. As  Munir Jiwa has pointed out, the past couple of decades have seen “the larger tropes of Islam/Muslims—terrorism, violence, veiling, patriarchy, the Middle East—become the normative frames and images within and against which Muslim artists do their work”.

Fatimah Tuggar, Daydream

In her own work, however, Nigerian-born Tuggar has had little engagement with either the contemporary theopolitical maelstrom of “Islam and the West” or with the earlier Orientalism.

Her interest lies rather in exploring the economic and technological impact of “the developed world” and how it interacts with local cultures in postcolonial African societies. She explores this subject through interactive media installations and images, which combine modern and traditional objects. Tuggar uses her own photographs as well as advertising and other found images from magazines and archival footage. The resulting hybrid objects and collages are eye-popping, witty and unexpected.

Often, her works are described as clever, amusing, or light-hearted, in the positive sense of not being “ideologically loaded,” and the constant tropes in her collages leads many to see her work as ”the American dream meets the African village.”

Although it is true that Tuggar uses vintage and modern ads, popular culture, and other forms of Western excess consumerism from magazines, and contrasts this with archive or contemporary photography from Africa, the artist points out that she brings together images from many different cultures, including Asia. She also remarks on the fallacy of equating “a country and a continent,” a jarring juxtaposition in itself, which underscores the  problems she explores in her work. [Read more...]

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Revisiting Miriam Cooke’s “Muslimwoman”

January 11, 2012 By

Shirin Neshat, Women of Allah.

Miriam Cooke has described her use of “Muslimwoman” in one word as a reference to embracing and performing a singular gendered and religious identity, a way of reflecting the intertwining of gender and religion and describing this erasure of diversity. In 2008, in her essay on deploying this term, Cooke explained:

The neologism Muslimwoman draws attention to the emergence of a new singular religious and gendered identification that overlays national, ethnic, cultural, historical, and even philosophical diversity. A recent phenomenon tied to growing Islamophobia, this identification is created for Muslim women by outside forces, whether non-Muslims or Islamist men. Muslimwoman locates a boundary between “us” and “them.” As women, Muslim women are outsider/insiders within Muslim communities where, to belong, their identity increasingly is tied to the idea of the veil. As Muslims, they are negotiating cultural outsider/insider roles in Muslim-minority societies.

As the drama around the rediscovered visibility of the Muslim woman in the modern world takes another manifestation post-2011, Cooke’s use of the ”Muslimwoman” is worth revisiting, particularly her argument about its deployment as a tool of political consciousness. As she points out:

Some women reject The Muslimwoman identification and others embrace it. Its uniformity across gulfs of difference intensifies an awareness of the global community in which they participate, a cosmopolitan consciousness that connects strangers who recognize an unprecedented commonality in terms of religion and gender. Their political consciousness qua Muslimwoman affirms the inextricable bond between gender and religion.

In combining these two words used to evoke a singular identity, Cooke follows Islamicist Sherman Jackson’s use of the term Blackamerican and Joan Martin’s term blackwoman. In Cooke’s case, however, there’s the danger of slippage between Arab and Muslim, which relates to Cooke’s own background in Arabic literature, including her co-edited anthology of Arab feminist writing, Opening the Gates, and War’s Other Stories: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War. [Read more...]

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