The Women's Work Issue Women's Work. Pen and Brush. 2019 | Page 14

pen + brush x of note
the power of gentleness. Revealed through a
series of tableaux—where gentleness is both
subject and object—strength, might, grace,
grit, resistance, justice, and vulnerability all
take shape. In these meticulously constructed
and styled scenes, the artist is present in
triplicate as photographer, subject, and
Arab woman. Beyond the image, the artist
is activist and scholar as throughout her
body of work she “[A]ims to upend the
traditional lack of agency of Arab women in
their depictions. . . and create a complexity
for Middle Eastern women’s bodies and
experiences by revisiting and re-visualizing
historical and contemporary images of
them.” 1 Accompanying the subject throughout
each frame is an arsenal of objects, at
once familiar and foreign, that have been
transformed into stunning—and often quite
unsettling—sculptural headdresses, which the
artist has conceived and designed. Alshaibi,
who uses the Arab female body, and always
her own body, in her work, is intentional in
fashionioning the headdresses as vessels that
are overwhelming, if not overpowering. They
are meant to implicate a pervasive image
of the Middle Eastern woman many of us at
some point or the other have encountered,
and in turn accepted as truth—the pious,
veiled woman at the well, gracefully balancing
a water vase on her head.
In some images, the sculptural objects allude
to the toil of women’s work—a ceramic
water jug, glass bottles, circle pans—and the
gendered roles these items of domesticity
might signify such as water bearer, bread
seller, or milk maid. In others, we see the
craftsmanship of women’s work—embroidery,
sewing, weaving—made manifest in crowns
constructed of feathers or spools of thread.
In other scenes, Alshaibi interrogates objects
rampant throughout the genre of Orientalist
portrait photography—the veil, mashrabiya,
smoker’s pipe—that have aided a Western
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gaze to romanticize, eroticize, fetishize, and
other the Middle Eastern woman. Or, worse,
render them invisible or hyper-visible, which
is its own kind of invisibility. As a collective,
the subject’s pose and stance in the portraits
in Carry Over reference a grave historic
malpractice—the role of photography, both
colonial and contemporary, in reducing the
body, the life, the desires, the experiences, the
hopes and dreams, indeed the very existence,
of the Middle Eastern woman to a dangerous
single story—one rooted in the primitive and
in fear, fantasy, inferiority, and objectification. her images and find their own narratives.
To make Carry Over , Alshaibi employs gumoil
printing—a painstaking photographic process
whose end result is one-of-a-kind prints that
appear as unique, vintage engravings and
that cannot be replicated. While the gumoil
process essentially erases time through an
aesthetic that conveys a sense of the past,
the woman in Carry Over is no relic. She is
very much part of our present. Some of us
learn through news headlines and some us
come from places where we’ve witnessed
for ourselves all the things women and girls
continue to bear: “Women still carry most of
the world’s drinking water,” or “A day in a
girl child’s hellish life in Gujarat’s salt pans,”
or “Iraqi women carry gas cylinders on their
heads.” This remains women’s work.
I see Water Bearer and Marjana and they
conjure memories of my own childhood
growing up in Guyana, the early mornings
spent with the women and girls of our
neighborhood filling up buckets of water
for our day’s supply. While Alshaibi’s oeuvre
over the past twenty years has deepened our
understanding of the women of the Middle
East and North Africa, as well as critiqued
entrenched misunderstandings that continue
to haunt those very women today, the beauty
of her work, despite its regional specificity,
lies in how the artist graciously makes space
for women of the world to see themselves in The title of Carry Over itself alludes to the
dual readings of the work. It first signals
the burden of all the things we continue
to carry as women of this 21 st century
world—war and conflict, gendered violence,
economic inequality, policing of our bodies.
On the other hand, there is a simultaneous
restorative narrative operating as we are
shown the singular strength of the bearer.
It is the woman, and she alone, who bears
these objects—the embodiment of the weight
of the world—on her head. While the objects
and sculptural headdresses shift, morph,
and change, it is she who remains constant,
grounded, standing, unshakeable.
Women’s Work
Alshaibi notes in her intention for the work:
“The implication is that the subject is
not only the bearer of the absurd and
irrational, but conversely, that in her
total isolation, she is transformed from
an object of passivity into an active body
that sustains and supplies oneself. She
provides her own water and her own
energy. She is inscribing through her own
body, a mechanism of survival.” 2
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displacement from Africa, her exile from
Cuba, and her experience as an Afro-Cuban
woman living in North America.” 3
For Campos-Pons, women’s work is rooted
in the intersections of art and healing. As a
Cuban woman and as an artist, she returns
time and again to the transformative and
healing qualities of the traditional cultures
of her homeland. That includes La Vega, a
large sugar plantation town in the province
of her birth, Matanzas, located on the
northern shore of the island. She regards
this most important place as, “A melange of
memory, trauma, and rich cultural legacy, as
well as erasures, that can only be resolved
through healing. Healing here is conceived
as a transcendental force, but also as
transformative gestures.” 4
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
A study of the provocative and boundaryless
oeuvre over the past three decades of María
Magdalena Campos-Pons, regarded as one
of the most important Cuban artistic voices
today, reveals an artist who has demonstrated
an unwavering commitment to steeping her
artistic practice in representing the important
work and roles of women in Cuban society,
art, and history. Scholar and art historian
Lisa Friedman aptly notes that the content of
Campos-Pons’s work, “[C]enters on the Afro-
Cuban diaspora, particularly her ancestral
María Magdalena Campos-Pons Angel’s Trumpets, Devil’s
Bells (detail), 2019, mixed media on Arches archival paper,
9 panels, 40 x 26 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
We see the artistic and healing influence of
this place emerge in the towering mixed-
media work, made of a nine-panel grid
composition, Angel’s Trumpets, Devil’s Bells .
Campos-Pons situates the campana flower,
whose Cuban names include flor de campana