As We Gaze Upon Her: Womanhood, Fluidity, and Depature.
by Leena Aboutaleb
Banat Collective is a creative platform dedicated to opening discursive conversations relating to womanhood within the context of South Asia, North Africa and West Asia and their diasporas through contemporary art and writing. Producing exhibitions, panel discussions, and two books, In the Middle of it All (2018) and As We Gaze Upon Her (2022), Banat observes the expansion of the notion of “woman.”
As We Gaze Upon Her (2021), exhibited at Warehouse421, explicates the notion of “woman,” its mythologies, and its constraints. Banat posits that “woman—” and its various forms—is subjective—an idea and a body. It is malleable, imagined, and exploitable, existing in a liminal space, fluctuating between challenging and perpetuating social hegemonies. A subjugated vessel, “woman” is a carrier of social norms of objectified bodies, codes of family honor, gendered duties that dominate public and private space, bearers of migrancy, displacement, replacement, and labor.
The exhibition engages with multiple methodologies and art-practices, asking both artist and viewer to question rather than to look for answers. Photography, in particular, holds the intrinsic ability to allow others to see from one’s gaze. What questions and actions are being used in order to move into different points of departure and where do those departures lead us?
Aude Nasr, a Lebanese-French photographer, exhibits Reversing Symbols (2021), examining binaries and gender-codes, blurring and reversing the codes, lines, and symbols through photography. Using double-exposures and light manipulation, Nasr merges the subject’s family history with their respective imaginary and perception. Wearing symbols personal to one’s family, Nasr attempts to materialize a “coming together” of one’s identities, collapsing fragments into an ethereal and cohesive self with and by traces of ancestors. Nasr’s work and the frame in which she shoots showcase a fluidity rather than the linear, observing how people interact with the camera’s gaze.
In Good Night, Sweet Dreams (2021) Augustine Paredes navigates the diasporic narrative within the UAE. Through continental relevancy and sexuality, using photo as a main vehicle to explore migration and the labor force, Paredes wishes the audience “good night, sweet dreams” contextualising himself in his bedroom. He appears, back-facing the audience, feet curled in fetal position with a sheet half-wrapped around his sleeping body, in his bedroom. Paredes’ work is printed on fabric, lifesize, then laid over a bed as a way of translating it into physicality, retaining a tangible and living element to his work.
Jude Al-Keraishan, in Sanad (2021), documents her dismantling and destruction of the masnad (a seat) splintering the wooden frame with an axe over multiple photographs, fracturing systems of authority. The photographs’ movements animate the still images, taking the viewer on an imaginary journey with Al-Keraishan as she disfigures patriarchy with her sequential and monochromatic series.
For Alagroobi and bin Safwan, As We Gaze Upon Her is not a traditional rendering of an exhibition on feminism, but pushes against and in relation to what may be typically established as from West to East. Rather than creating a simple import external critical thought, Banat attempts to establish a form of canon where one can exist irrespective of other baselines and critiques, becoming “in relation to itself” rather than to any other.
Originally published by Tribe Photo Magazine, issue 13.
As We Gaze Upon Her (2021), exhibited at Warehouse421, explicates the notion of “woman,” its mythologies, and its constraints. Banat posits that “woman—” and its various forms—is subjective—an idea and a body. It is malleable, imagined, and exploitable, existing in a liminal space, fluctuating between challenging and perpetuating social hegemonies. A subjugated vessel, “woman” is a carrier of social norms of objectified bodies, codes of family honor, gendered duties that dominate public and private space, bearers of migrancy, displacement, replacement, and labor.
The exhibition engages with multiple methodologies and art-practices, asking both artist and viewer to question rather than to look for answers. Photography, in particular, holds the intrinsic ability to allow others to see from one’s gaze. What questions and actions are being used in order to move into different points of departure and where do those departures lead us?
Aude Nasr, a Lebanese-French photographer, exhibits Reversing Symbols (2021), examining binaries and gender-codes, blurring and reversing the codes, lines, and symbols through photography. Using double-exposures and light manipulation, Nasr merges the subject’s family history with their respective imaginary and perception. Wearing symbols personal to one’s family, Nasr attempts to materialize a “coming together” of one’s identities, collapsing fragments into an ethereal and cohesive self with and by traces of ancestors. Nasr’s work and the frame in which she shoots showcase a fluidity rather than the linear, observing how people interact with the camera’s gaze.
In Good Night, Sweet Dreams (2021) Augustine Paredes navigates the diasporic narrative within the UAE. Through continental relevancy and sexuality, using photo as a main vehicle to explore migration and the labor force, Paredes wishes the audience “good night, sweet dreams” contextualising himself in his bedroom. He appears, back-facing the audience, feet curled in fetal position with a sheet half-wrapped around his sleeping body, in his bedroom. Paredes’ work is printed on fabric, lifesize, then laid over a bed as a way of translating it into physicality, retaining a tangible and living element to his work.
Jude Al-Keraishan, in Sanad (2021), documents her dismantling and destruction of the masnad (a seat) splintering the wooden frame with an axe over multiple photographs, fracturing systems of authority. The photographs’ movements animate the still images, taking the viewer on an imaginary journey with Al-Keraishan as she disfigures patriarchy with her sequential and monochromatic series.
For Alagroobi and bin Safwan, As We Gaze Upon Her is not a traditional rendering of an exhibition on feminism, but pushes against and in relation to what may be typically established as from West to East. Rather than creating a simple import external critical thought, Banat attempts to establish a form of canon where one can exist irrespective of other baselines and critiques, becoming “in relation to itself” rather than to any other.
Originally published by Tribe Photo Magazine, issue 13.