Photos examine women’s roles in Middle East

Bottom line: A Moroccan-born artist looks at Western perceptions of the Middle East in her complex, layered photographs.

Artist Lalla Essaydi’s photographs are depictions of another world.

Comely, dark-eyed women with long, black hair cloaked in robes and long dresses occupy lavish rooms decorated with ornate tapestries, fabrics and rugs. They meet our gaze, looking out like exotic birds from these plush, gilded cages; neither miserable nor content, but strangely static and voiceless. Their strangeness is affirmed in the Islamic calligraphy that covers their skin and garments: reams of text that Essaydi paints onto her models with henna.

Though the women seem inert and ineffectual — trapped in these lavish but constraining prisons — the words suggest some hidden agency or desire for expressiveness.

Now a resident of New York, Essaydi’s work is informed by her childhood growing up in Morocco and years spent living in Saudi Arabia. Her work arises from the complex identity of a Muslim woman educated in Europe and America but with strong ties and identification with the Middle East, even as she questions the role of women within that region.

The large-scale photographs are a reminder that despite collapsed national borders, globalism and 24-hour news coverage, there are still vast mysteries and cultural divides between East and West, a lingering divide that Essaydi’s work both examines and reaffirms. Her work is directly concerned with the oppression of women, but stretches that oppression from the gilded cages of Orientalist art done by European painters in the 19th century to the modern Middle East where even the seeming breakthroughs of the Arab Spring have not yielded increased freedom or autonomy for women.

Essaydi’s photographs reference the tradition of 19th-century Orientalist paintings, a genre of works by European artists like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jean-Léon Gérôme that served up the exoticism of distant lands in extremely conventionalized ways by obsessively focusing on Middle Eastern harems and women in sexualized poses. In those paintings, harems were a constant fixation, a depiction of the East imagined by European painters but with little resemblance to reality, Essaydi has said.

In works like “Harem Revisited #38,” a woman draped in long, ornate robes stares out at the viewer from a room covered in equally ornamental tapestries. Like the other women in Essaydi’s photographs, she becomes enmeshed, entrapped within her surroundings and the conventions of the Orientalist genre.

In a series of works titled “Bullets Revisited,” women stand in rooms with floors and walls composed entirely of bullets. But the rooms are not only patterned in bullets: The women’s dresses, bracelets and capes are festooned with dozens of bullet casings. As in the “Harem” images, the women become like some decorative element within the elaborate, shimmering backdrops. The intricate patterns of bullets suggest tiles or mosaics and like the tapestries in the “Harem” works, create a slightly claustrophobic, entrapping space that Essaydi has said relates to her own childhood growing up in Morocco and being punished for misbehavior with confinement in the family home.

Works like “Bullets Revisited #21” illustrate the complicated mix of references Essaydi is invoking: A woman wearing a dress covered in calligraphy holds a syringe filled with the henna the artist uses to write on the skin of her models. Behind her, the floor is covered in hundreds of spent bullet casings. In the image, a female desire for expression collides with a menacing backdrop suggestive of the forces at work to keep expression at bay.

The works can sometimes suffer from a decorative, fashion magazine quality with their surface emphasis on lithe, beautiful models and opulent settings, which can detract from the photographer’s ultimate message about female oppression and entrapment. Essaydi’s photographs both question the idea of female beauty and ornament as seen in the Orientalist genre, but can also reaffirm a sense of women as beautiful, decorative exotics.