Dania Saleh

Art and Women

I consider myself to be a Muslim-Arab American woman and I uphold pride in representing myself by wearing the hijab (Islamic headscarf). It can be rather frustrating to get frequent stares and receive odd questions like “Do you take a shower with that thing on?” There is also an endless list of preconceived notions that Westerners have towards Muslim women who wear the hijab. This consists of us being “oppressed”, we are forced to wear the headscarf, we don’t have the same rights as men, or the best stereotype of all time is that we are not independent. These falsified statements and the medias portrayal of Muslims have caused an up rise of Islamophobia in the United States. 

Many Muslim women have proven our society wrong by working as doctors, lawyers, social workers, authors, artists etc. An artist that sparked my attention is Sara Foryame. She is a “female, Muslim, contemporary artist exploring the religion Islam branching out to the media portrayal in particular focus to Muslim women, gender identity, cultural and social influences world wide and transculturalism and urbanism in the Middle East.” One of her artworks consists of a 15 seconds video of  scarves placed into plastic bags that is shaken up, thrown around and squeezed by a person’s hands wearing pink dishwashing gloves. Sara explains this specific artwork by saying:

The cloth is assigned political and cultural contexts but what we are looking at, at the end of the day is a piece of cloth, threaded and woven together into a form. The project explores how the media sculpts, prods and squeezes the depiction of Muslim women and their scarf. I remove the woman from the image, making no room for assumptions, and ask the viewer what does the scarf mean now? The media has killed the Muslim Woman, her dreams, and her accomplishments and left the anchored scarf for autopsy. 

This is the link to her blog and the 15 seconds video 

http://www.frozenvanity.com/#!death-of-a-muslim-woman/c1b33