Bullet Revisited #32 2013

This photograph “Bullet Revisited #32” was created by Lalla Essaydi, but the date is unknown. Look closely, and you might see that the patterns that adorn the figures and the architecture around them aren’t patterns at all, but words, painted onto every surface in henna. I imagine Essaydi, surrounded by her models and all that shimmering gold, thinking about tradition, cultural expectations, and the gaze. You get a sense of how the space has come into being through layering, the way she’s built up the image detail by detail. The henna feels almost like a heavy impasto. The way the figures are positioned, reclining, looking directly at us, is something that echoes through art history. It’s almost like she’s thinking about Matisse’s odalisques, or maybe Ingres' Turkish Bath, and asking, “What does it mean to see this scene through a contemporary, post-colonial lens?” Artists are always in conversation with each other, even across time, remixing and questioning what came before.