ART
Jeddah Diary (2012) Helen Shaw speaks to Olivia Arthur on her photographic essay, documenting young women in Saudi Arabia. I recently wrote a paper on the newly published and enchanting photographic essay, ‘Jeddah Diary’. Assuming pride of place in my room, this photographic diary currently haunts my desk, although not in an exhaustive thank-godmy-deadline-has-passed-and-it-was-an-alright-piece-of-work kind of abject presence. On the contrary - against the dismal and bleak, grey window panes and walls, its sheer physicality and materiality (it’s laden with a beautifully orangey and fiery fabric), shines like a jewel in a cave. Once opened its content echoes back at its reader the very stimulating refractions and reflections it wishes to cast its magic of ambiguity onto: ‘I feel like a precious stone or diamond’, they echo each other, ‘you should keep it away from eyes to keep it in a safe place.’ It has a Golem-esque “my precious” element to it, sure, but this particular quote, printed adjacent to a photograph of a young woman wearing a full-length hijab, camouflaged by her living room curtains and sofa as she peeps out from behind to ‘see’ the outside world, poses a fundamental problem concerning the integral positioning of women’s rights within contemporary Saudi Arabian community.
I spoke to Olivia on her recent publication and what she thought these photos meant for the future in terms of the changing role of women and their rights in Saudi Arabia:
Arthur’s photography offers a new vision for both Western and Eastern ideals on women’s rights and agency to engage in a level-pegging visionary dialogue, where neither assumes agency or authority over the other culture. Its approach, to create a collaborative space in order to address, inform and ultimately conduct a possible renegotiation of identity for young women in Saudi is startlingly subtle, yet powerful in its diarist format. Revealing a series of unsettling portraits, Arthur’s photography is a multitude of dualistic and dialectic vocabulary: most fundamentally a blurring between subjectivity and objectivity, where women’s faces are censored and concealed, identities fractured and fragmented into a leg, an arm, an eye!? We start to contemplate what it means to censor or conceal identities in both the East and the West; and more so, a woman’s identity. In true elliptical and paradoxical art historical fashion, my interpretation was that of my first thought for this article: the ghostly, shadowed identities of Arthur’s diarist entries will forever be left open to interpretation, forever left to haunt and taunt the viewer’s thoughts and opinions on women who emerge from the shadows of a patriarchal society. 6