‘It’s about liberating women’s experiences’

Standing at the edge of the balcony and looking out into the city, she looks comfortable in her skin. Her curves are scantily clad, as though she does not care that it might elicit comments.

Inside a well-lit room, on a bed, two pairs of legs are in focus. Here too, comfort seems to reign, and once again, the subject appears not to have a care in the world, the sense of confidence evident as she revels in her solitude.

A selfie at the kitchen window, the stove and cooking paraphernalia in the background. No tummy tucked in, and no rouge anywhere on the skin. Clear and real, the reflection is not perfect, but the picture itself is.

A video shows a woman rubbing her palms together with what appears to be a shade of crimson. Is it paint, or blood? Only a closer look can tell.

These are just some of the images that welcome visitors at Swallow This: Arab Women and Body Politics, a multi-medium visual exhibition currently on at Alserkal Avenue. Organised by Gulf Photo Plus, the exhibition features works of two young Arab women – Lebanese-born Lara Chahine and UAE and Oman-based Reem Falaknaz – aiming to shine a spotlight on the limited conversations that currently exist on the female body image.

Through her work, Lara intends to shed light on how external factors have an immediate impact on women, and how they could have an intimate role to play on the mental and physical state of females. “I want women to feel, be seen and represented.... [it’s about] liberating women’s experiences and practising self-love in a vacuum, a personal revolution for independence and self autonomy.”

Reem Falaknaz leaps out of the conventional and “abandons all the rules of a photographic practice in the context of the Gulf Photo Plus gallery space”. Her works clearly are deep and layered having the power to captivate a train of thought. Her documentation is a digital media project that “appropriates” internet culture, print media, literature, and oral history.

If a hymen breaks, and no one hears it focuses on remedies offered to women in the MENA region, and documents conversations with people who offer solutions promising full restoration. Her work attempts to shed light on the covert ways women navigate deep-rooted practices, sorcery, and medical malpractice.

Together, the duo are raising several questions while also highlighting certain issues that some sections of women face even today.

Born in 1998, Lara is a self-taught photographer from North Lebanon and is currently based between Beirut and New York. Focusing first on academia and earning a degree in political science, it wasn’t until much later that she considered photography in parallel to politics. She learned how to click a shutter and how to visually convey her surroundings during Lebanon’s October Revolution, she says.

Reem is an Emirati who spends her time in the UAE and Oman. Her work documents the social and physical landscape of the UAE and its inhabitants. In 2014, she took part in the Arab Documentary Photography Program that is funded by the Arab Fund for Art and Culture, the Prince Claus Fund, and Magnum Foundation. Her commissions include UAE’s National Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, and 2020 Lahore Biennale.

With Bless Your Beauty, Lara explores the pressures on the expectations that are set on women. Finding the ways society objectifies women distasteful, she embarked on a topic that she says needed to be spoken out. “I decided to work on something that I really hated about our society – the expectations that are set on women. From our heads to our toes and quite literally everything in between, women are not autonomous. Our body and our being [seem to] belong to the people to gaze upon and judge as worthy or not. These crippling pressures are unnecessary especially when we aren’t guaranteed any rights in return.”

She explains how women end up spending an incredible amount of time, energy and money to look “good enough” on top of all the apparent “medieval inequality” women face today. “Beauty is so highly regarded that the insecurities it causes are almost impossible to untangle. It’s these complexities that come with beauty and purity in Lebanon that I found compelling enough to want to dig into further.”

For Reem, the idea for her work sprung five years ago as she was scrolling through online visual content, a habit she finds hugely interesting. Be it old historical manuscripts and book covers to contemporary online content including blogs and video clippings, she collects data that intrigues her. During one such search, she stumbled across a herbalist who among other things, claimed to restore a ruptured hymen.

Her interest piqued, she was keen to know more and the people behind such practices. What she discovered was a web of occult and scientific fallacy.

Through the use of audio clippings, videos, and photographs, Reem has been able to convey a message that speaks volumes through sight and sounds about this practice common in certain parts of the world.

Her work, to quote the brochure, explores the rampant “pathologisation” of women’s bodies, where the “politically absurd, visually surreal, and humorous converge”. It features more than 40 artworks including photography, digital media and video installation.

From the narration of both women, it becomes evident that many of today’s women still face several challenges in terms of societal expectations.

Although career-driven and focussed, many women are still expected to get married early in their lives, have children and run a household. “It seems that no matter what she does, she is still reduced to her role in the family and how elegantly she carries herself while doing so. As an Arab woman in the West, I am objectified from an orientalist point of view, and misrepresented in western media and television. Arab women are not celebrated the way they are supposed to be. Instead, they are just objects of societies’ desires,” says Lara.

Her words pretty much echo Reem’s thoughts too. Reem makes it clear that what she discovered through her explorations left her both appalled and determined. She found some ugly truths in the underbelly of a society that was audaciously objectifying women, to the extent of defying reason, logic and even science.

“The conversations are almost bizarre,” she says. Young women, for various reasons, end up seeking help from those who then exploit their vulnerabilities while offering solutions producing innocent victims of a skewed societal environment.

Lara points out the contradiction she observes in the Lebanese society. Women are considered to be motherly, virgin figures but are also expected to be surgically symmetrical, youthful, and attractive … “automatically setting women up for failure.”

“The matriarchal system in certain places means a women’s body belongs to the males in her family– her father, brothers, and husband. In a lot of cases this striving for beauty is a source of social currency, making her the most suitable bride. In other cases it’s a means to shield pain. How well a woman can take care of herself even in the most difficult situation is a social indicator of strength.

“If a woman, ‘let’s her self go’ this is considered a sign of weakness. Gaining weight or losing weight is an unsolicited family discussion and any sign of body hair is shunned. I could go on and on about this constant policing of women’s bodies, but I believe the politics behind it stems from the commodification of women, westernisation, our cultural norms...”

Swallow This! is a convergence of the minds and thoughts of the two artists who both explore the complicity of medical industries in the pathologisation of women’s bodies. While Reem’s work explores “remedies” that are sold to women looking for body restoration, Lara’s work brings attention to how women’s bodies are objectified.

Through this exhibition, the women draw on the “uncanny collective experience of womanhood”.

“The title isn’t simply meant to create shock value – this is a reference to the realm of the medical and the bodily, and to the way we are taught, as women and girls, to keep our thoughts, desires, discontent to ourselves,” explains Rama Ghanem, curator of Gulf Photo Plus.

The exhibition is not dreary or melancholic. There is wit, whim, sarcasm and a lot of thought provoked. “It felt right to be taking something serious, like this conversation about our bodies and autonomy over our health, and approaching it with a degree of humour,” says Rama. She feels there needs to be a new, and different approach to feminist work that is distributed and exhibited in the region. “Work can be serious in its influence, and still be delivered in an accessible, light way. I’d like to challenge audiences with work that is both humorous and critical, ultimately put on an entertaining, biting show that is witty, charged, emotional, and intelligent.”

She points out that a conversation, or exhibition that focuses on the politics of the body isn’t an individualist endeavour, “because it’s inevitably those that includes and concerns the wider community”.

Recent years have seen a surge in more sophisticated work from young Arab women photographers in the region, and Rama feels it is time a space was dedicated for them to express the importance of experiences women face.

“We are constantly navigating casual, normalised sexism. Both Lara and Reem’s projects reveal this truth to viewers in a way that readily invites them into dense research on women’s experiences, and into the dark underbelly of the internet where women are exploited, and into domestic, private spaces where women seek and create refuge for one another.

“We are so aware of our image(s) – what we look like in photos, in the mirror, to others, or our social reputation. That’s an out-of-body experience too. I suppose that sense of dislocation, of tension, is the driving force of this show. I hope whoever visits this exhibition keeps their minds and hearts open to the layers and depth of focus that this work has to offer, beyond appearances.”

The exhibition runs until April 15. Lara’s work can be viewed at larachahine.com and on Instagram (@_larachahine). Reem’s work can be accessed on reemfalaknaz.com and on Instagram (@reem_falaknaz).