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The photograph Boushra Almutawakel He was born in Yemen, was educated in the United States and returned to his country in the mid-1990s. He was then 25 years old and in a short time founded a gallery of exhibitions and art debates. There, he was able to show his work and reveal one of his main lines of thought: the role of women in Muslim and Arab societies. In those days her name was circulating again and it was precisely because of her way of showing the risk of women in the face of the power of religious fanaticism.
There are two collages with portraits taken by Boushra Almutawakel circulating to alert the world to the impact it may have on women and children – among other vulnerable groups – the advanced Taliban in Afghanistan. One shows a woman with a girl holding a doll in her arms. They are mother and daughter. The foreground shows them in their usual wardrobe. And in each of the following photographs an element is added to cover them: handkerchief, hijab and the burqa. The gesture on the faces of these women changes from image to image as they disappear from the scene. The last shot marks the end: only the background is visible. The woman, the girl and her doll are missing. They have been erased by the impositions of totalitarianism.
The image is circulating these days with the caption: “disappearance”. But, while it portrays one of the biggest fears that Afghan society suffers from these days, it’s not a new image. The real title of the work, in which the artist and her daughter are the protagonists, is “Mother, daughter and doll”. The photographs are a little over a decade old and the author is fascinated by the fact that they circulate from time to time. “It’s funny because there is always someone who tells me that they have seen my work on Facebook, but I am not the one posting it there,” she said. day by seeing how the series was again valid cyclically.
The shots are part of a larger work that the photographer has titled: “The hijab series“And whose objective is to focus on the rights of women and religious. “Yemen was already a very conservative country in 2010. I was afraid of seeing extremist interpretations of Islam spread. after the seizure of power by the taliban Afghanistan.
Almutawakel does not rebel against him hijab or even the niab but draws attention to the imposition. She argues that it should be every woman who decides whether or not to use it. “I have mixed feelings about it. When I’m in Yemen I feel comfortable with it because everyone uses it and in a way I feel more confident thanks to certain looks. It is, in a way, liberating. But not for me. it makes sense to cover my eyes or wear gloves. Another thing that I have a problem with is seeing girls with veils or even with the niab. Even if I finally believe that every woman has the right to choose how she wants to present herself to the world, either with hijab, Nicab or with any of them, ”she reflected when asked about the matter.
Although she is critical of it, the photographer – aware of the symbolic weight of the veil – is not only concerned with the impositions that Islamic fanaticism imposes on women. women but also the tacit or explicit standards they have across the world. “In the West, they are slaves to the media selling machine, which tells them how to dress and how much to weigh. Or they turn them into sex objects in advertisements. In the rest of the world, it happens too, from prostitution to pornography. he said at the time, celebrating how his work can be interpreted in various ways.
The photos with her daughter are from a 2010 production when she was 7 years old. Much later, the artist admitted “I don’t think that much has changed since then in terms of the status of women and their rights. In any case, they have worsened,” she concluded.
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