Petals visually morph into bows and butterflies, settled, beautifully disturbing on tumbling hair that covers not just the child’s face, but almost her entire body. Barely able to contain the overwhelming shroud of traditional femaleness with a simple rubber-band, my sins (2010) demonstrates Sa’dia Rehman’s innate ability to bring forth simultaneously emotions of discomfort, anxiety, fear, and affection in sculptural practice. There is something tender and innocent that captures the imagination as our vision annotates the disjunction between the overflowing adult-like hair and the child-like accessories—the quintessential black mary janes and the loose socks bunched up around the shins and ankles. The child sculpture captures the ambient sexuality of Lolita. Somewhere deep inside, the viewer can sense the violence of their own gaze, which reduces the child to a sexual object. Yet we also want to protect it.

In a more direct, swift, and shocking moment, the sculptural installation Divine Guidance (2010), shifts our attention to forms of lynching. The playful pretty nature of the many layered skirts, swinging in the breeze, provides a sweet gesture, bringing the viewer into familiar shadows of party dresses. And yet, the figures hang from the soles of their feet, legs splayed, and in one case, vagina split with hair and tinsel. The awkwardness of the child-like aperture decorated for attention, and our discomfort in the realization that once again, the viewer’s gaze reinstates the violence of losing an aspect of life, highlights Rehman’s strength in this show: illustrating the quietness of brutal and coercive acts. The subtlety with which her subject matter integrates with her choice of material, illustration, and sculptural form creates the uncanny that resists protection and demands acknowledgement.

The almost confessional struggle against sexual expectations mired in politically charged visual registers is bound by the frustrated beauty of Gazelle Samizay’s video work ‘Upon my Daughter’. The static culminating image, Upon my Daughter - 7 (2010), sets the tone and moves into motion the other stills from the video in the series: a vision in white, the body of the woman is wrapped and bound in the wedding dress as funeral shroud. Playing with two cultural icons of suicide, the image resurrects stories of Ophelia and of the shaheed (the martyrs) from a time of war. Combining these narratives, Samizay proffers a cultural critique on the institution of marriage and on the construction of imaginaries in war-torn immigrant and refugee communities. Excavated from the history of that image, the others are held together by the fine threads of cultural traditional, each frame folding in upon the next, propelled by the multiplicity of rings and fingers it takes to prepare such embodied forms of immigrant expectation.

In Upon my Daughter - 5 (2010), each pair of hands dexterously works at embroidering convention onto the fabric, the individuality of the women reduced to their fingers on white satin. The stills appear as news reports compiled of disembodied and discrete images, body parts separated by explosions into individual frames. These forms are reminiscent of the trauma of war and index blasts of immigrant expectations of marriage for women. The supreme fluidity of cultural expectations that traverse new geographies of alterity into new not-quite-homes-yet becomes the subject of new imaginations of self in the diaspora. Living in the unfamiliar, the reinstantiation cultural traditions become comforting for those who had to leave everything behind, particularly due to violent conditions. These women in the series transform and transmit that pain between generations, complicating their relationships. Within this framework we witness in Upon my Daughter – 2 (2010), how the young woman is strapped into white dress, painstakingly embroidered in fuses and confusions of red threads, and prepared to be the culturally appropriate self-sacrificing woman. The constant repetition of the woman’s body being prepared by other women, suggesting their complicity in this act, simultaneously creates the narrative for the series and guarantees the replication of a traditional practice upon a multitude of daughters. By situating these rituals within the diaspora, Samizay complicates our notions of where such traditions are located and performed, and how such dictations of culture in different contexts might emerge as critique. The spaces of diaspora create moments of morphed subjectivity, simultaneously beautiful in form but morbid in structure—decayed vestiges of traditional patriarchy that inevitably, like the notion of the martyr-bride, must be torn apart in these new locales.  

Unsure of where these in between body forms leave us, between child and woman, between bride and martyr, the works in this show imbue the transformative moment of these subjects with political and cultural critique. They seduce us with sensual gestures, colors and expectations of innocence, beauty, and purity. It is only once we engage with them that we bear witness to violence and pain on innocent bodies, creating a discomfort that is both rousing in a period of apathy due to the excess of political images, and upsetting, as it reminds us of the continued use of female bodies in the service of patriarchy.

The study of human behavior under highly unusual circumstances is often how absurdist fiction is understood. This genre highlights the ambiguity of characters, indirect narratives, and the constant flux of meaning that leave us in interpretive spaces that are inherently subjective. The works in this show, much like Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, create protagonists who continue to move through the everydayness of life, while a poison slowly kills them from within. Drawing us into their narratives, both Sa’dia Rehman and Gazelle Samizay, launch their critiques of the systems of control and violence that continue to transform women’s lives around the world. If only we could claim that this was just absurdist fiction too.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.