Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art

African Arts, Summer, 2004 by Prita Meier

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.