Siobhán Shilton: 'Creative Multilingualism in the Visual Arts: Photography, Performance and the ‘Arab Spring’'
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This paper focuses on an example of art that dialogues with, and exceeds, multiple languages – visual and verbal – to produce alternative images of women in response to the ‘Arab Spring’. Art representing the female body in this context has to negotiate a way between a complex web of icons, from Samuel Aranda’s photograph of the fully veiled Yemeni woman holding her injured son to the controversial naked selfies posted on social media by certain women from Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. US-based Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi uses the medium of photography, which has contributed to reinforcing ‘icons of revolutionary exoticism’ and enduring Orientalist myths. She combines references to French and other European works of art (particularly Orientalist, Revolutionary and Christian), as well as incorporating Arabic calligraphy. I ask how traces of languages are incorporated and contested in Essaydi’s photographic work. How does the mixing of languages in visual art lead to the creation of new meanings in the contexts of the ‘Arab Spring’ and its aftermath? Which theoretical approaches might be adopted in analysing such ‘multilingual’ art?