Lalla Essaydi

Lalla Essaydi is a Moroccan photographer known for her staged photographs of Arab women in contemporary art. ¹ In her own artist statement she presents herself through multiple lenses — as artist, as Moroccan, as Saudi, as traditionalist, as liberal, as Muslim — and invites the viewer to resist stereotypes; that self-description names no school, and her data records her faith as unknown, with the evidence stated there. ¹

She was born as Lalla Assia Essaydi in Marrakesh, Morocco, in 1956, and left to attend high school in Paris at the age of sixteen. ¹ She married after returning to Morocco and moved to Saudi Arabia, where she had two children and divorced. ¹ She returned to Paris in the early 1990s to attend the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, then moved to Boston in 1996, earning her BFA from Tufts University in 1999 and her MFA in painting and photography from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2003. ¹ She works in Boston and Morocco, and her current residence is in New York. ¹

Influenced by her experiences growing up in Morocco and Saudi Arabia, Essaydi explores the ways that gender and power are inscribed on Muslim women's bodies and the spaces they inhabit, and she has stated that her work is autobiographical. ¹ Her signature method applies Arabic calligraphy — a practice traditionally taught only to men — in henna, the material used to decorate brides, over her subjects' bodies, clothing and surroundings; the words are indecipherable, in an attempt to question authority and meaning. ¹ Her process involves hours of hand-painting the henna calligraphy on her subjects and their environments. ¹

The series Converging Territories, begun in the early 2000s, captures women dressed in white, covered in henna calligraphy, within traditional Moroccan domestic spaces — including the kind of space where she herself, as a young woman, was sent when she had disobeyed, a space she says haunts her work. ¹ In Les Femmes du Maroc the women are posed after the compositions of Orientalist painting, represented as decorative and confined by the art of henna; the series re-reads the nineteenth-century European fantasy of the Arab woman and returns the gaze to the women themselves. ¹ In Bullets and Bullets Revisited she constructs backdrops, floors and clothing from cut bullet casings, combining beauty and menace. ¹

Her stated goal is to document her own experience as an Arab woman, seen now from a different perspective — a quest to find her own voice, and not to show herself as a victim. ¹ Her work has been exhibited at the National Museum of African Art, which mounted Lalla Essaydi: Revisions, and in Lalla Essaydi: Photographs at the San Diego Museum of Art in 2015, and was featured in Revival at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2017. ¹ Her photographs are held by, among others, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and in 2012 she received a Medal Award from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. ¹

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