Lalla Essaydi

Biography

The house where “Converging Territories” was photographed is linked in Essaydi’s mind with her childhood: in her family, girls and young women who had disobeyed were sent to such a place as punishment, by some accounts for a month, with only silent servants for company. The artist has said that her works are haunted by the spaces she inhabited as a child.

She was born in Marrakesh in 1956, into a traditional Muslim family. Her father, by some accounts, was a self-taught painter, and she spent a great deal of time in his studio. At sixteen she went to study in Paris. After returning to Morocco she moved on to Saudi Arabia.

In the early 1990s Essaydi was in Paris again, studying at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Sources differ on the year she finished: by some accounts 1991, by others the exact year is unknown. In 1996 she moved to Boston, in 1999 she received her BFA from Tufts University, and in 2003 her MFA in painting and photography from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. By some accounts, in 2001–2002 she herself taught painting there.

She came to photography out of a need to photograph real spaces, and for that, in her words, she had to go back to Morocco, where she had grown up. Her series rest on a single device. Women in white garments stand in traditional Moroccan interiors, and Arabic text is written in henna on their skin, their clothes and the walls. Calligraphy was traditionally taught only to men; Essaydi learned it on her own. The writing cannot be read: the words are poetic and indefinite, and the artist deliberately avoids any specific meaning. In Morocco henna is associated with family celebrations, among them a girl’s coming of age; it is more often women, who are discouraged from working outside the home, who apply it. Each image takes many hours of hand-painting on the models and on the whole space around them. By some accounts, the models were the artist’s friends and relatives.

The series “Converging Territories” was begun in 2003–2004, followed by “Les Femmes du Maroc” (2005–2006), “Harem” (2009), “Harem Revisited” (2012–2013), “Bullets” and “Bullets Revisited” (2012–2013). Besides photography she paints and makes video. She calls her art autobiographical and says she wanted to speak of the experience of an Arab woman, seen now from a new distance, and not to show herself as a victim. The difference she noticed between the lives of women in the United States and in Morocco also influenced her choice of subject.

Essaydi’s work has been shown at the National Museum of African Art in Washington (2012), at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Baku (2013–2014), at the National Museum of Bahrain and at the art museum in Tampere (2014–2015). In 2015 the San Diego Museum of Art mounted the exhibition “Lalla Essaydi: Photographs”, and in 2017 her photographs were included in “Revival” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.

In 2012 the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston awarded her a medal.

Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, the Williams College Museum of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Today Essaydi works in Boston and Morocco and lives in New York.