body in context II

In this series of photographs (installations) based on paintings from the 16-18th century
I try to place myself in the place of these painted women.

The choice of these women from the past, express a sad position. It seams that in the present there is no reality that the woman can see as a target to aspire to. 

Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1513

The woman in the performance appears in the character of the painted woman, but this time with the backdrop of the landscape of her homeland. She tries to be someone else but she remains always tied to her own reality.

By bringing the painting from another period and place to the woman’s local landscape one depicts the diaspora that traps a woman thou she remains in her land and her place. The diaspora of the time and the place results from the social and political reality of the woman.  

Jan Vermeer, La Lechera, 1658

From the other side the woman in the performance gives a different life to the painted women, life that in the end is similar to there own. Like some kind of game along the generations that at the end the woman remains the same woman, chained within her world, tied to the reality of her place and time aspires towards another and better world.

The homeland is not necessarily the soul and the landscape but also the society and mentality that encompasses the woman.

In this case the woman and the landscape are one, the landscape (the homeland) is occupied and is raising an aspiration to another reality, like the woman; a really of freedom and liberation, a reality of the true “self”.

The occupied landscape is exactly like the woman both of them are trying to imagine another reality similar to the paintings of the 16-18th centauries.  

Nattier, Jean Marc. Marie-Adelaide of France, 1745

**The Photographs are taken in the local landscape, in places within Israel/Palestine that she feels a personal attachment to.

Photography and text by Raeda Saadeh, ca. 2007
 

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