So Professor Skees beat me to posting about her, but I promise I was going to do it before even.
I saw her pieces in person at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art. They were huge pieces, which made it super worth seeing in real life.
I love her themes a lot. She focuses on gender and the Islamic cultural and religious traditions. Anyways, I think that it's good to see this issue played out by a Muslim woman born and raised within that culture, because that is a much more informed viewpoint for obvious reasons than that of western feminists.
In the exhibit I saw there was an explanation that she posed her models based on old orientalist paintings, but took out the surrounding objects, and only used fabric or mosaic with Arabic calligraphy as a background. The models were dressed in fabric matching the background so that they almost blend in, and covered with henna calligraphy.
And besides all of the different heavily charged themes. The work was just very beautiful, which is nice.
Here is the link to the exhibit's webpage. I'm not sure how helpful it is, but this is the interview Professor Skees posted which also had a lot of information and photos.
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