Synopsis

Both Kruger and Holzer use words and image as raw material to comment upon women’s position “exclusion and negative inscription” to intervene the market place of mass culture (Isaak 1996: 35) In this work I play upon the same codes and intervention, in which the image sought not only to defy a similar positioning for the female Oriental as voiceless other, as the object of the gaze, but also to reinforce the return of the gaze by using the odalisque as a cliché. My artwork places the same nouns and tests the relationship between the Western female gaze and the Oriental woman, similar to how Mulvey (1975) positions the audience as the male protagonist and the female as the object of the gaze on the screen. In this way, my artwork aims to make the power position between women visible. Using intersectional feminism as a lens to address inequality. 

Through reappropriating Kruger’s text (a canonised feminist artist), and the image of the odalisque facing out and confronting the viewer directly, I wanted to draw out a tension and the possible potential to foreground power relationships rather than gender relationships and to highlight privilege, a privilege reproduced not only through history and culture, but also through image and language.

Maria Kheirkhah