Yumna Al-Arashi’s debut monograph, “Aisha,” explores the ancient art of women’s tattoos across the North African and West Asian region. With such a long history of the camera being used as a tool of colonization and study in the area, the project is a step towards creating a more authentic archive, and addressing the disconnect between today’s SWANA generations and their family archives. Al-Arashi tells Dalia Al-Dujaili about the three years of work that led to the book’s creation, and how her own great grandmother inspired her to celebrate the long line of women in the MENA region that she herself descends from.
Yumna Al-Arashi’s debut artist’s book, “Aisha”—named after her great grandmother, whose portrait takes up the cover—celebrates the older generation of women in the MENA region. At just under 400 pages long, it places Al-Arashi’s images alongside her own writings, musings and poetry, as she bids to decolonize her own lens-based practice.
Using multiple iterations of the same frame, as well as showing photos fullbleed on its pages, gives the book a “cinematic feeling” of movement and involvement which Al Arashi claims is, again, “about defying the archive.” In one scene made up of two images, for instance, a woman poses on a chair in a typical portrait setting, but a cat behind her moves out of shot, giving the impression of movement and an idea of the space photographed. “You feel how I interact with the women, and it gives them a more dynamic perspective which doesn't feel like they're subject to this violence of image making, and that you can feel that I'm having a conversation,” continues Al-Arashi.
The book is a response, Al-Arashi explains, to the anthropological violence of selection and definition in traditional image making of indigenous people from the SWANA region. The book includes every single image Al-Arashi took over the project’s three-year period, therefore resisting the traditional Western archive, which often relies on surface-level snapshots of a people or place, limiting room for nuance.
After receiving funding from The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture and The International Women’s Media Foundation, the US-born Zurich-based photographer was able to travel to London and access archives at institutions such as The British Library, which she found to be grossly inadequate misrepresentations of her native region; “insulting” even.
“I am not an anthropologist, and also I have no intention of the body of work being an investigation in any way,” asserts Al Arashi. Her work, in contrast, “allows the women to feel much more participatory and alive, which was really the reason why I made this body of work in the first place”, she says. The male-dominated world of photojournalism is also one which has historically centered European frameworks and visual aesthetics of global regions. Images popularized during the mid century, which often reduced West Asian and North African people to objects of study, formed the basis of image making in the region and have influenced the modern practices of some of today’s most decorated European and American photojournalists, from Bruno Barbey to Steve McCurry.
It was a protest for me to make beautiful images around who I am…the landscapes of the country my family come from.
Photography has always been a medium for Al-Arashi to make sense of her own identity, whether by photographing her family in Yemen or making artworks involving her community of Arab women. This practice developed into a critique of the representations of Arabs and Arabised peoples post 9/11 as Al Arashi grew up in the US, unable to relate to mass media images, leading her to develop a portfolio exploring themes of womanhood, spirituality, place and identity. “The 99 Names of God” (2018), for example, is a short film challenging popular depictions of Islam; she focuses instead on the roles of femininity, nature, meditation, geometry and embodied rituals of the religion.
“I am romantic in that way. And I know it's not so cool anymore, but I don't care. It was a protest for me to be able to make beautiful images around who I am, who my friends are, what my family looks like, the landscapes of the country that my family come from,” she says of her journey into image-making, “in opposition to such ugliness that was being produced around those things.” This beauty translates heavily into “Aisha,” which is a tender and considerate approach at representing women from the Maghreb, especially as a community who have been pressured to cover their tattoos due to the negative cultural and religious connotations of tattoos in the modern Middle East. One woman sits indoors with shadows cast over her face, draped in chequered materials with dangling silver pendants, one hand raised to her head and the other resting on her lap. The light touches her hands—which are covered in heavy black-ink symbols wrapping around to her inner arm—as if her body were a practice canvas. The image is a stylistic echo of traditional portrait painting of the seventeenth century.
The women we meet opened their doors to Al Arashi, and although not all of them were keen to be photographed given the violent relationship between colonization and the camera in North Africa, the artist was able to interact with women who told stories tracing generations of matriarchal lineages and the application of body ink from young ages. “A lot of them had very spiritual connections to tattooing and were very proud of them,” she tells me. “A lot of them also felt very ashamed to have them because this newer generation is really against tattooing, and I think that came with a homogenized version of Islam being spread around the region, which unfortunately took a lot of individuality of different cultures away.”
Once the book is published this September, Al Arashi will hold events in Europe, the USA, North Africa and in the Gulf to address the disconnections between today’s SWANA generations and their family archives, as Western archives have been used to understand who we are. “I hope that this book could be the beginning of replacing an archive,” says Al Arashi. A lot of the tattoos in these images are heavily faded, almost imperceptible, a reflection of the fading tradition of tattooing in the region. The women’s bodies are containers of memory and living archives, and Al-Arashi's photographs are an effort to immortalize them for future generations.
