Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

New York, Laurence Miller Gallery, Lalla Essaydi: Converging Territories, January - February 2005, p. 7, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)

This work is in very good condition. There are some minute specs of dust stuck between the print and the Plexi, all of which are located along the bottom edge of the composition. The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate with the overall tonality being softer in the original.
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"In my art, I wish to present myself through multiple lenses - as artist, as Moroccan, as traditionalist, as Liberal, as Muslim. In short, I invite viewers to resist stereotypes."

Lalla Essaydi’s powerfully evocative Converging Territories series represents a dynamic shift in the artist’s career. Previously photographing women in an abandoned home in Morocco owned by her family—creating a literal space of Islamic female confinement—here Essaydi has removed the site-specific definition from her photographs altogether, allowing her subjects to create their own meaning and interpretation within an ambiguous space. Essaydi adorns the women and their surroundings with calligraphic henna, a meticulous and painstakingly time-consuming process that can take a full day. Calligraphy is customarily only accessible to men; by applying it onto women using henna, Essaydi further subverts Islamic gender roles, explaining that “the henna/calligraphy can be seen as both a veil and as an expressive statement. Yet the two are not so much in opposition as interwoven. The ‘veil’ of decoration and concealment has not been rejected, but instead has been integrated with the expressive intention of calligraphy. Although it is the calligraphy that is usually associated with ‘meaning’ (as opposed to mere decoration), in the visual medium of my photographs, the ‘veil’ of henna in fact enhances the expressivity of the images. By the same token, the male art of calligraphy has been brought into a world of female experience from which it has traditionally been excluded…Through these images I am able to suggest the complexity of Arab female identity—as I have known it—and the tension between hierarchy and fluidity at the heart of Arab culture” (Exh. Cat., New York, Laurence Miller Gallery, Converging Territories,  2005, p. 27).