Catalogue

Catalogue examines the visual regimes through which Arab women were staged, objectified, and politicized in twentieth-century moving-image culture. The video draws on British Pathé newsreel rushes made between 1935 and 1965, when film crews from Britain traveled through the Middle East to document the subjects and territories of empire. Interwoven with this footage is a performance by Alshaibi as a live human water feature, magnifying the decorative and objectifying logic through which Arab women were often rendered in Western representation.

The second half of the video turns to the late 1960s, when the Palestine Liberation Organization circulated images of Arab women fighters as symbolic figures of revolutionary struggle. By placing these visual strategies in relation, Catalogue examines how Arab women’s bodies were made to carry competing political fantasies: imperial possession, exotic display, militancy, liberation, and nationhood.

Catalogue
2019
Video, 6 min. 4 sec., silent

Originally commissioned by Artpace, San Antonio, Texas.