Art in Review
PERSPECTIVES: Art, Women and Islam
Published: August 20, 2009
The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts
The James E. Davis Building
80 Hanson Place, Fort Greene, Brooklyn
Through Sept. 13
The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, more easily called MoCADA, is a New York story, by now often told. The museum started in a walk-up office space in a church house in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It now has its own space, small but sharp. An adjacent empty lot is begging for future expansion.
None of this would mean much if the exhibitions weren't good, but for the most part they are. The current one, "Perspectives: Art, Women and Islam," is a collaboration with the Museum for African Art, which is completing its own new permanent home in Manhattan. There are five artists, all women, all in their 20s or early 30s, whose relationship to Islam is as varied and diffuse as the term itself.
Chris Questel/Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts
"The Moon Inside of Me," by Safaa Erruas, from "Perspectives: Women, Art and Islam."
Two artists work in media stereotypically identified as Islamic but use them in offbeat ways. Fariba Alam, an American of Bangladeshi descent, makes tile mosaics that integrate elements of Sufi mysticism into family photographs. Mahwish Chishty, originally from Pakistan and now in Washington, evokes the lyricism of South Asian garden architecture by projecting Arabic script through sheets of gently moving water.
Safaa Erruas, from Morocco, contributes the most abstract piece, an enigmatic wall relief made from strips of white cotton held in place by needles and metallic wire. A wall label by the curators, Kimberli Gant and Lisa Binder, finds possible sources in Ms. Erruas's family textile and dressmaking business, but there's also something extremely personal going on. Soft but bristling, tall as a figure but vaguely vaginal in form - a superattenuated version of Magdalena Abakanowicz's "Abakan Red" of 1969 comes to mind - the sculpture is titled "The Moon Inside of Me."
Born in Russia in 1977, reared in Algeria, now living in France, Zoulikha Bouabdellah makes the show's most critically feminist statement. Her "Silence" consists of a half-dozen prayer rugs on the gallery floor. Two round holes have been cut in each where worshipers might place their knees when prostrated in prayer. But in each set of holes Ms. Bouabdellah has placed a pair of snazzy gold high heels, surrogates for women who may be praying but are definitely not bowing.
By contrast, willing devotion is the subject of videos by the New York artist Nsenga Knight, who for several years has been interviewing Muslim women in Brooklyn. At least two of the three subjects included in the Mocada show converted to the Nation of Islam from Christianity in the civil rights era. One of them speaks plainly but eloquently of that moment of change in her life and weeps when recalling it. Obviously her perspective on Islam is quite different from that of the younger Ms. Bouabdellah, but you wonder whether in the end the impact on both is not equally strong. HOLLAND COTTER
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