BARCELONA, SPAIN.- The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona presents today "Harem Fantasies and the New Scheherazades," an exhibition conceived and directed by the Moroccan writer Fatema Mernissi, author, among other books, of Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems, in which she reflects on the theme of this exhibition.
Mernissi says that what prompted her to write the book was the realization that Western journalists - men - have an idea about the harem which is very different to the reality. This idea finds its iconographical references in certain Western artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose fascination with the theme of the harem raised it to the category of myth. Eastern artists, meanwhile, had represented the harem according to their own aesthetic canons, creating a very different reality to the one reflected by the West.
The exhibition, produced and organized by the CCCB, brings together Eastern and Western representations of the reality and the myth of the harem, allowing visitors to contrast their different views of beauty and love.
Harem Fantasies and the New Scheherazades brings together 150 works, some of which are regarded as masterpieces of the history of Western art: Delacroix, Ingres, Gerôme, Picasso, Matisse, Fortuny, Constant and Boucher are some of the artists represented in the show.
Alongside them are Eastern miniatures, engravings and books by Persian and Turkish masters and from India’s Mughal dynasty, plus original photographs documenting the life of the inhabitants of the harem.
The show closes with a selection of works by contemporary artists from the Near East and North Africa who challenge the very basis of traditional attitudes to women in these areas. They are the new Scheherazades: Jananne Al-Ani, Ghada Amer, Samta Benyahia, Shadi Ghadirian, Ghazel, Selma Gürbüz, Susan Hefuna, Malekeh Nayiny, Shirin Neshat, Houria Niati, Raeda Saadeh, Zineb Sedira and Nadine Touma.
The exhibition includes outstanding works on loan from such foremost institutions as the Musée du Louvre and the Musée Guimet, the Musée National d’Art Moderne-Centre Pompidou, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Musée Picasso in Paris; the Museum of Topkapi and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in Istanbul, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York, among others.
The exhibition has four sections: Scheherazade, Views of the Harem, The Last Harem, and The New Scheherazades.
The word harem is derived from haram, the illicit, that which religious law forbids, as opposed to halal, that which is allowed. As a family institution it represented a private space with strict codes and rules that had to be observed, and where womenfolk were closed away so that they could be controlled, as they were seen to interfere with and upset masculine emotions and reason. Their confinement turned them into the enemy, as only something that is regarded as a danger is locked up. In Western eyes, conversely, the harem is the projection of a fantasy, of a desire - ultimately, of the imaginary. It is a blank space in which dreams can be projected. In the absence of constrictions and prohibition, the woman who inhabits it becomes an object of sexual pleasure, who appears to be happy and take pleasure in her confinement.
1 - Scheherazade
Between 1704 and 1717, the first European version was published of The Thousand and One Nights. Jean Antoine Galland, its translator, had no idea that his work would come to be the principal reference in Europe’s fascination with the East, a fascination that was to cross two centuries and give rise to orientalism and turquerie.
However, in the course of his translation, Galland modified part of the contents and style of the Persian manuscripts, adapting them to the spirit of the eighteenth century. Scheherazade, the young Persian woman who, in Eastern tradition, symbolises the intellectual heroine who was able to transform the beliefs, motivations and psychology of her husband to the point of persuading him to give up his idea of killing her was thereby reduced to a superficial, voluptuous image.
In the East, on the other hand, it was not until 1804 that the text of The Thousand and One Nights was first edited in Arabic. Throughout the centuries during which the stories were handed down orally, Scheherazade became the model of a woman who fought for her freedom, in this case opposing the king’s desire to kill her. The stories she told exemplified the desire to be free, as each one showed just how uncontrollable the women of the harem were, and how absurd female obedience was in a space where inequality had been established as law.
This first section brings together Eastern and Western manuscripts and printed texts of The Thousand and One Nights, dating from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, including the well-known versions by Galland, Lane, Burton and Mardrus. It also features Lady Mary Montagu’s famous letters describing the interior of the harem in Istanbul, and travel books by Nicolay, Melling, Ferriol and Guer, among others.
2 - Views of the Harem
Two qualities characterized the women created by the Western imaginary of the harem: nudity and silence. They were presented reclining, placid and calm, as vulnerable images that could be modified according to the desires of each observer, unable to leave the cloister of their rooms until the viewer of the painting saw fit to hand them their clothes. In this way, the harem manifested itself as the projection and the desires of a sexuality that was absent from the place where the work was created. Works by artists such as Gérôme, Fortuny, Boucher, Chassériau, Ingres, Delacroix, Matisse and Picasso, all included in this exhibition, present woman in all of her passivity. Placid, static, the figure of the woman became an object to be apprehended at any moment by Western fantasies.
In the Eastern world, the illustrations that went with the books as of the eighth century, and which became a favorite with collectors of secular painting, represented woman not just as a focus of love, but also as an active partner who could therefore not be forced to yield. A clear example is that of Shirin, the most renowned Persian heroine of painting who symbolized captive woman turned adventurer, hunting wild animals and crossing entire continents astride swift steeds in search of her beloved after escaping from the harem where she had been raised.
Very few men have remained untouched by this fascination with the harem. Drawing near, including themselves, observing, as an active or passive part of the artistic work, their role as actors or mere voyeurs has revealed their relationship with the space of imprisonment. In Eastern images, man is included as an active part of the representation. Unconcerned with the vulnerability of showing his emotions before the woman, he is presented as an unsure, dependent lover.
The Eastern harem was a reality. Even today, a visit to the palace of Topkapi (Istanbul) still includes the halls where favorites, eunuchs and odalisques were shut away. Muslim men dominated women by means of space, excluding them from public life. For the West, however, the harem has only existed as a fantasy. Deprived of its spatial reality, it was represented in temporal terms, dominating the woman and manipulating time and light.
Yet the seraglio also involved other realities. In private space, the women organized their time in relation to pleasure as though it were a sacred priority. The majliss, for example, was a meeting in a garden or on a terrace, where the participants gave themselves up to the art of conversation; mastery of music or chess was an exercise of the intellect, and skill at poetry a female ability that a man had to learn before engaging in an erotic relationship with a woman.
In the section ’Views of the harem’, the visit includes a dialogue between Eastern miniatures and Western paintings. We find Il ballo dell’Ape by Vicenzo Marinelli beside a Turkish miniature from the late eighteenth century, representing a birth in the harem; a woman in a hamman by Gérôme alongside another painted by the Turkish artist Abdallah Bukhari; the passive, anonymous odalisques of Fortuny, Boucher and Ingres contrast with the Islamic miniatures representing the heroine Shirin. Delacroix, and Picasso’s Algerian women find a counterpoint in the intimacy of love scenes portrayed in Eastern miniatures.
3- The Last Harem
While Matisse was painting his Odalisque à la culotte rouge (1921), showing a young Turkish slave girl in a harem, Kemal Atatürk was proclaiming women’s right to vote. Just twelve years before, in 1909, the Young Turks prohibited the harem, and the Sultan of Turkey was forced to free his slave girls, who then became citizens of the first Republic in the history of Islam. Turkish Civil Code, adopted in 1926, made polygamy illegal and granted husband and wife equal right to divorce, and the same rights to custody of the children. These measures, most of which were adopted as a way to end colonization, were to make their influence felt throughout the Islamic world, from Morocco to Pakistan.
In this way, then, the series of odalisques painted by Matisse in the twenties corresponded to representations of French women who only existed in his imagination. The painter had spent three months in Morocco in 1912, and another three in 1913, on a journey, practically a rite of initiation, made by many painters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, despite his emphasis on what these trips had meant to him (’la révélation m’est venue de l’Orient’), he produced his series of odalisques away from Turkey, in a Paris whose models dressed up ’à la turque’ allowed him to retain in his thrall women who, in real life, were pursuing lives in politics.
The painting Odalisque à la culotte rouge (1921) by Henri Matisse heads this section. Alongside it is written and graphic documentation about the changes in the role of women in Turkey at the start of the century: from the closure of the last harem in Topkapi (1909) to images of the first women to occupy public posts. The section closes with an extensive series of images illustrating the orientalist erotic myth in photography and film.
4- The New Scheherazades
Scheherazade is above all an artist: a woman with imagination, inspiration, originality and talent. When she risks her life to save other women, she mobilises all of her resources - a formidable confidence in herself, intelligence, beauty, interpretative ability and literary skill - to enthral a husband who is prepared to kill her as soon as he loses interest. She takes on the lord of her destiny by captivating him with the ingenious arabesques of her tales. Thanks to her creativity, she manages to save herself and possible future victims by overcoming her lover’s mistrust of women.
’The New Scheherazades’ explores the ways in which Eastern women today enrich contemporary society by using a personal visual language to challenge the very basis of traditional attitudes to women in the Near East and North Africa. This part of the exhibition not only reverses the telescope, it also explores the contradictions and paradoxes of our societies by questioning our perception of ’others’ and of ourselves as regards gender, race and culture. They are not ethnographic artists, they are artists who are interested in the sources of their culture, whose work contributes to expanding its aesthetic horizons and encouraging a greater understanding of it.
The final section of the exhibition, ’The New Scheherazades’, comprises a selection of paintings, sculptures, drawings, tapestries, photographs and audiovisual installations by the contemporary artists Jananne Al-Ani, Ghada Amer, Samta Benyahia, Shadi Gadirian, Ghazel, Selma Gurbuz, Susan Hefuna, Malekeh Nayini, Shirin Neshat, Houria Niati, Raeda Saadeh, Zineb Sedira and Nadine Touma.