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Museum of Fine Arts
Boston
August 27, 2013-January 12, 2014
Norman Mailer once remarked that giving a camera to Diane Arbus was "like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child." Although his quip was off-color, his observation of Arbus's ability to use photography to detonate society's preconceptions wasn't off-base for, as unsettling as her images are, they give visual witness to those whom mainstream culture has cursorily surmised and then conveniently disregarded. In She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World, curator Kristen Gresh convenes twelve artists in whose deft hands a camera is equally a means to a more truthful depiction of a typically misrepresented group: women of the Middle East. In this war-torn region, it's fitting that their cameras become weapons that, while metaphorically explosive, inflict no actual physical damage. Rather, what this moving exhibition does destroy are Western sereotypes about women in the Arab world.
Because the great majority of these works address the lives of Muslim women, it's perhaps not surprising that a number of them engage the issue of the veil. The most superficially heavyhanded of these is Boushra Almutawakel's Mother, Daughter, Doll (2010), a series of nine images in which a woman holds her daughter in her lap, while her daughter in turn holds a baby doll. In the first, the happy mother wears a fairly Westernized hijab-a headscarf meant to indicate piety-while her similarly smiling daughter, not yet in puberty, is bareheaded. Over the course of the remaining eight photographs, the triad becomes increasingly veiled and, bit by bit, their body parts disappear. The crystalline blue eyes of the baby doll-peeking above a tiny niqab-accentuate the absurdity of such restrictive dress. By the final image-a desolate black background devoid of figuresthe women have been erased. Initially, this project seems too easy; only when a viewer closely observes that the expression in both figures' eyes slowly changes from joyous to grim does one realize the emotional toll veiling may take. More optimistic is Tanya Habjouqa's series Women of Gaza (2009), which subtly contests the preconception that veiling prohibits women from full participation in modern life. In vividly hued images, Palestinian women do aerobics in a gym, picnic along the beach, and...