In Les Femmes du Maroc Lalla Essaydi addresses the complex issue of female identity from her adult Arab and Western perspectives. Originally from Morocco, but currently living and working in Boston, Massachusetts, the artist sets her arresting, large-scale colour photographs within an uninhabited house, where she spent weeks during her girlhood as punishment for transgressing the rules of gender conduct. Against the same setting, she places her femmes — old women, brides and young girls — covering their bodies with waves of hand-applied henna calligraphy that extend onto the surrounding walls and floor. Through the combination of calligraphy, an Islamic art form reserved solely for men, and henna, an adornment practice traditionally relegated to women, Essaydi crosses a prohibited threshold, foregrounding thereby an intimate female body beyond the encoded patriarchal structures and the stereotypical cultural patterns of Islamic society.

Though abundant in words, the series reinforces a discontinuity between presence and absence, volume and vacuum, and it does so by means of a minimalist aesthetic of crème nuances, which cancels all existing fissures and spatial boundaries. A cloud of a transparent space revolves around bodies, white robes and veils, rendering them all into a two-dimensional blank surface. White and ethereal, Essaydi’s woman becomes plain decoration. Constrained not merely between walls, but also within the tangled layers of a pre-existing iconography as a licensed symbol of fertility and purity, she is fated to be visible only in the transitory moments of marriage, birth and puberty, alongside eggshells, sugar and virginal flowers. As such, the female identity is seen possessing no outlet for expression within the house, whose bounds project nothing but perpetual silence. However, it is in this confined domesticity, in this non-linguistic and non-male environment, that fundamental distortions and rebellious actions of expression can be conveyed.

If annihilated within the patriarchal hierarchy, the woman is designated voicelessness, this lack of expression certainly allows her to occupy a space outside the margins of given interpretations. Following the Lacanian pas tout, Essaydi’s female bodies, always in fluidity, arise as corporeal expressions of a semi-ghostly womanliness. But, whereas they might assert that la femme n’existe pas, they are at the same time oppositional alternative spaces, on which can be generated new, undiscovered meanings.

Beyond challenging femininity and Islamic tradition, Essaydi creates, both as a woman and as an artist, an open contextual space in which self-expression is used to deny a preconceived identity.  In this respect, Les Femmes du Maroc suggests a territory beyond representation, in which femininity and the Orient are revealed to be nothing more than rhetorical constructions, or topoi, and even aesthetics itself is shown to be a congeries of references originating from a quotation or from an amalgam of some previous imaging. Caught somewhere between identities, Essaydi’s mysterious white spaces are a tool towards creating a new visual language, one which will allow this impermissible hidden universe to speak.