Lexington Books Contemporary Feminist Art by Women in North Africa: Body Talks (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France)

Contemporary Feminist Art by Women in North Africa: Body Talks dissects the diverse perceptions of the body and how it becomes symbolically charged in the artwork of six contemporary Maghrebi female artists: Majida Khattari, Lalla Essaydi, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Déborah Benzaquen, Fatima Mazmouz and Zaïnab Fasiki. With a focus on the French, Maghrebi, and North American market and examining artistic mediums ranging from painting and photography to videos and installations, Ramona Mielusel highlights how the body functions as both subject and object of aesthetic discourse. The author denotes these artistic works as the intersection of the intimate and the impersonal, of the individual perception and the communitarian and societal view, without promoting a fixed notion of the body in a specific spatiality and temporality. This book explores the work of female Maghrebi artists and their intentional framing of the body’s duality between the symbolic and the real, between cultural interpretation of the body in literature and the actual perception of the body.