Reina Lewis, 'Preface'
In: Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art. Edited by David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros. Published by Institute of International Visual Arts in Association with Modern Art Oxford, 2003, pp. 9-15.
The veil is an item of clothing dramatically overburdened with competing symbolism. This publication and the exhibition it accompanies offer a welcome chance to address the gap between individual experience of veiling and its complex and contested status in a variety of public arenas. In an agenda-setting selection, this project unites historical material, personal accounts and critical writing with contemporary visual art to show how the heterogeneous use of veiling, as dress act and visual trope, is endlessly repositioned by changing world events and constantly re-framed by the nuanced shifting responses of veiling communities.
For women who wear it and artists who represent it the veil is a garment whose meaning cannot be contained. It is a garment fought over by adherents and opponents, many of whom claim that their understanding of the veil’s significance is the one and true meaning. But as this project demonstrates, if the secret imagined to lie behind the veil reveals one thing it is that it cannot be contained within a single truth, experience or understanding. Instead, the veil emerges as a form of clothing that is rooted in specific historical moments and locations, whose depiction is similarly contingent and whose adoption, adaptation and rejection is always itself relational.
For the West, long obsessed with seeing behind the veil, the veil stands for the fantasised absolute divide behind East and West. Within a binarised worldview, penetrating behind the veil is the key to the mysteries of the East and a route to the penetration of territory (symbolic and literal). Seen often as proof of the oppression of Muslim women or as a marker of cultural difference in need of ‘toleration’, the veil has always and continues to excite strong reactions and counter-reactions. For women who wear the veil, or who come from veil-wearing societies even if they themselves do not veil, Western attitudes (and their local take-up) cannot be avoided. But wearing a veil is a dress act whose level of volition or compunction varies for each community and for each woman. Moreover, in the space of a single woman’s lifetime the reasons that affect her decision to cover herself and the ways in which this is achieved can vary in response to personal, geographical, social and political events. Negotiating with local, national or diasporic community gender systems is never an isolated event when the figure of the veiled woman is fought over as emblematic of whole societies.
Today the veil is almost always regarded as an Islamic institution and is often claimed as such. Though it is now predominantly associated with Muslims and Islam, in the past veiling was a social practice shared by many populations in the Middle East and North Africa, where to veil spoke of status rather than religion. Like the harem system’s division of space, the veil was part of a system of gender seclusion that impacted more on the rich than the poor, more on the urban than the rural and that co-opted men into reciprocally modest behaviours. But these practices never occurred in isolation and changes in veiling habits came about and come about not only in relation to local developments but also through interaction with the West. The emergence of local forms of modernity and postmodernity marked by the engagement (forced and voluntary) with Western ideologies, markets and cultural forms, produces shifts in the perceived local and international significance of the veil. Standing as a beacon of tradition or an emblem of progressive modernity, the veiled or unveiled, de-veiled or re-veiled woman has been a feature of divergent struggles over decolonisation, nationalism, revolution, Westernisation and anti-Westernisation.
In all of these developments women’s agency has been central as they struggle to deal with the myriad ways in which the figure of woman becomes symbolic for all sides of political debate. Yet the veil is often read by the West as evidence of the very denial of women’s agency, or is over-inflated into the most important feminist struggle. But, in fact, for many women the requirement to veil is often the least of their problems in the face of economic and social deprivation. In other instances, women’s veiling is strategic, providing an alibi for behaviours outside the home that would otherwise be deemed gender subversive. Though the potential liberation afforded by veiling is recognised by some earlier Western travellers, the myth that seclusion equals subordination continues to structure attitudes to veiling in the West and among those postcolonial regimes characterised by aggressive secularisation. Thus women, in their public presentation, navigate a complex dialectic of local patriarchies and international politics.
These loaded social and (sometimes) personal conditions are also the context within which artists make representations of the veil. In addition, their work and its reception is bound to be positioned in relation to existing visual conventions in the depiction of the veil. From Western Orientalist painting to movies to media current affairs, coverage of the veiled woman continues to haunt the visual imagination, reincarnated in contemporary terms that inevitably owe an allegiance to longstanding misapprehensions about the nature of veiled life. Rather than simply offering a corrective to this well-established visual iconography, Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art selects work that not only shows the variety of visual response to veiling, but that also foregrounds the contingency of the viewer’s interpretation. The different experiences and cultural and historical knowledges that viewers bring to the artworks discussed here and seen in the exhibition mean that a number of readings can emerge. This accommodation of differently constructed interpretive communities challenges the closing down of meaning that artists from veiling backgrounds often experience, since diasporic artists, particularly those who feature the veil in their work, frequently find that they are categorised regionally or exclusively in relation to Islam.
It thus remains a matter of political and cultural urgency to reconceptualise the economy of multiple gazes that filter through, slide off and remake the veil. This project is one such opportunity.