COLUMBUS, OHIO.- The Columbus Museum of Art presents Lalla Essaydi: Converging Territories, on view through December 4, 2005. Converging Territories is a series of large-format color portraits of women and children taken in a large, unoccupied, family-owned house in Morocco, the same house where, as a young woman, Essaydi was confined for a month at a time whenever she transgressed her permissible roles.

Revisiting that house, Essaydi creates a mysterious and timeless space with a cloth background, entirely covered with Islamic calligraphy that she has written in henna. She then painstakingly covers the women and children with henna before photographing them in front of the cloth. Essaydi's intent is to explore cultural patterns within both Arab and Western societies, to reach beyond stereotypes, and to convey her own experience as an Arab woman. "Through these images," she states, "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."