Harem #11 2009

Curator: Ah, this work gives me the feeling of being held in a memory, something seen a long time ago but impossibly vivid. It's Lalla Essaydi's "Harem #11" from 2009. A collage, I believe, incorporating photography, and it just breathes atmosphere. Editor: Yes, a first impression suggests a study in tessellation and spatial recession, creating something of a dialectic between interior and exterior spaces within what is surely a complex, architecturally rigorous plane. Curator: You've immediately cut to the geometry, of course. But look at those figures! Those women, caught in this silent exchange just beyond the doorway—that tension between constraint and maybe even quiet rebellion hums through the whole image. Editor: Indeed. Essaydi plays intriguingly with surface and depth. Notice how the architectural elements, columns, arches, create a repetitive yet subtly varied rhythm. This structured framework contrasts and thereby amplifies the figures in the central panel and their, as you say, tense posture. It echoes the patterns on the wall. Curator: Patterns that seem to constrict, right? Like the gorgeous prison of domestic space? Essaydi is constantly wrestling with representations of women in Islamic art, questioning Orientalist fantasies about the harem. It is very personal; I get a feel for an untold story. Editor: Precisely, it seems she's strategically subverting those fantasies through a canny deployment of the visual language typically used to perpetuate them. See, the composition directs the eye to this liminal zone—a powerful invitation, I feel, to decode layers of representation, identity, and space within these constraints. Curator: So what might this "Harem" communicate about how women experience traditional settings and whether there is even room for them to subvert? Do they conform, do they challenge, or perhaps both simultaneously, captured in what, as you point out, becomes that dialectical struggle? It's the unsaid which feels like it speaks the loudest, to me at least. Editor: I would completely agree; I’d never considered the collage nature, it invites you to keep going, seeing if you are ever really “in” the harem. I was fascinated. Now, seeing the layers of context, the way you connected its intimate essence… Well, this resonates even more. It brings depth and layers.