Leila Fatemi’s practice is committed to testing the boundaries of photography. Trained in traditional approaches to photography, the Toronto-based visual artist’s work is informed by a familiarity with photographer-to-subject relationships. Her close attunement to that relationship shapes her careful consideration of the actors that come together to make up the narrative of an image.
Through her photography, Fatemi develops intimacies by looking at and being with the images she works with, disrupting the passive gaze, and taking the constructed image as truth. Bridging themes of colonialism, gender, and spirituality, Fatemi’s work challenges viewers to consider their role in relation to the representational accuracy and cultural consequences of Orientalized subjects. Her work offers alternative perspectives surrounding the colonial gaze, ethnic representation, and collective numinous experiences by employing methods of subversion and reclamation as tools to resist imperialist legacies.
Bridging themes of colonialism, gender, and spirituality, Fatemi’s work challenges viewers to consider their role in relation to the representational accuracy and cultural consequences of Orientalized subjects.
Fatemi and I met at an opening at Xpace Cultural Centre in 2018 and established an ongoing kinship since then. We connected over creating a work-craft balance as arts administrators. She shared what she had been working on after having been on a five-year hiatus from arts-making, while establishing herself in her role at Gallery 44, where she manages educational programs for emerging Black, Indigenous, and racialized photographers. A central part of her value system is to create spaces for other marginalized artists to flourish and develop their artistic voices—something I deeply admire about her practice.
Beginning in 2021, Fatemi’s research and multimedia art project, A Vessel to Bend Water, uses Orientalist postcards of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) women from the early 1900s that were taken in-studio as source material. The results manifest as experiments with cyanotype, collage, screenprint, photolithography, and ceramics.
A Vessel to Bend Water uses Orientalist postcards of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) women from the early 1900s that were taken in-studio as source material… Spending time with the portrait images is a tender gesture of refusal against their intended narrative.
Orientalism, a concept first explored by Palestinian American academic Edward Said in his 1978 book, Orientalism, can be summarized as constructed perceptions by those in the West about SWANA peoples, as well as histories which ultimately serve to justify Western imperialism and colonialism. In relation to Fatemi’s work, Orientalism works to violently deny self-representation, perpetuating harmful tropes about SWANA women, and invisibilizing the subject’s humanity.
Spending time with the portrait images is a tender gesture of refusal against their intended narrative. Insisting on their presence and value retrieves and returns power back to the subjects. Through Fatemi’s various forms of artistic intervention, she gestures towards other possibilities that recontextualize the image and the narratives inscribed on these historic women. In our conversation, held at Leila’s studio in Toronto, we discussed the process of art-making, the importance of play and failure, and the necessity of creating balance—emotionally, physically, and spiritually—in order to replenish yourself when working with heavy topics.
M: What prompted you to start the series A Vessel to Bend Water?
L: There’s a pretty big through-line in a lot of my previous projects, just looking at the history of photography and how it relates to the depiction of women from Southwest Asia and North Africa. As I was coming into photography, I was thinking a lot about my role as the photographer, and also, how I felt my community has been represented historically. It led me to look at images throughout history from the beginning of photography, and how these ethnographic images were created and stylized to fit a specific narrative. I’m constantly looking at these depictions and trying to poke holes in the truth aspect that comes hand-in-hand with how we think of photography as being a documentation of something.
Disrupting archival images changes the larger narrative about people from that region, specifically women.
From 2013-2018, I did a project called Revealed / Re-veiled, using images taken by French photographer Marc Garanger of women in Algeria. During the occupation of Algeria by the French, he was commissioned to take photos by his commissioner of everyone in town to create ID cards. When he came back, the officer was unhappy with the fact that the women were veiled, either covering their hair or their face. So he had to go back out, and basically force them to unveil. It’s this really powerful series of portraits of these women who look very upset, angry, and protective. Because it was a digital archive I was working with, I was re-coding the images and they would glitch as I was messing around with them. Disrupting archival images changes the larger narrative about people from that region, specifically women.
Later, I started collecting Orientalist postcards because I go to postcard shows pretty often. I have developed two main collections: spaces of worship and Orientalist imagery. One day, as I was going through them, I noticed the prominence of the [water] vessel. For me, it became a symbol.
A weary weight we carry
M: How did you set up a criteria in terms of choosing images that you want to work with?
L: I initially worked with the physical Orientalist postcards of women that I had collected. As I was researching these images more, I came across a few digital archives online. The biggest one that I used was through the Getty Institute, and it was the Ken and Jenny Jacobson Orientalist Photography collection. I was looking for any photos of women with vessels that were shot in-studio. Probably more than 90 percent of the images coming out of mainly Egypt at that time were in the studios that the French, the Brits, and the Germans went and set up in Cairo and in other major cities. A lot of times, they would hire women—lower class women, mainly sex workers—and they would pose and dress them in the studio. It wasn’t organic, by any means. It was entirely staged.
That’s really what drew me to these photos—it’s totally constructed by their gaze and their reading of women from that region. There’s actually very few non-studio photographs and the ones that I had found that did have a vessel were mainly groups of people going to get water through the role of the water carrier. That was also quite interesting to me because the role of the water carrier was still a prominent role but mainly in rural communities, because Egypt had way more advanced systems of water transportation by the time the French were there. Through these images, they almost made it seem like this is how people went to get water. A lot of the photos have these little descriptors at the bottom, where for example, they will refer to the women as fellah, as in peasant.
An ode to an echo that lingers in my ear
M: Did you feel overwhelmed looking through the archive?
L: Totally. The first way that I addressed that was my first intervention, recreating these images as cyanotypes [a camera-less photo technique that involves laying an object on paper coated with a solution of iron salts before exposing it to UV light]. I have created over 120 cyanotypes and that is the majority of the archive that I’ve collected. The cyanotype is the original blueprint when we think about architecture. So when I’m working with these images, and looking at these images, I’m also recognizing their role within the history of photography as being a sort of blueprint for how they were produced, how women from Southwest Asia and North Africa have been represented, and how that intersects with representation today and where I fit within that as well.
Working with water is really important as part of the medium, and that has ties to thinking about the water vessel and the role of a water carrier, and bringing that into the actual process of things. Creating the cyanotypes really helped me develop a relationship with these images just simply by translating them into negatives through the exposure, and then working with them and creating this grid system of them. I started to familiarize myself with certain poses and common themes, which set the stage for subsequent interventions that begin to break down the narratives they presented and perpetuate.
The cyanotype is the original blueprint when we think about architecture. So when I’m working with these images, and looking at these images, I’m also recognizing their role within the history of photography as being a sort of blueprint for how they were produced.
M: I was thinking about the level of intimacy that you would have developed with them. And over that kind of rigorous process, if you started picking up on some of the gaps, questions, or missing narratives that would only come through by looking at them with that level of detail.
L: A lot of times, when we think about the shape and the nature of a vessel, you think about a woman’s body, and that was quite a strong connection for me. The cues that I was picking up were visual, like repetition of poses. I imagined these women and thought of how the instructions were conveyed. It was really curious to me because I imagined that there was a language barrier too and so I also wondered from the perspective of the photographer, were there physical interventions? What was happening there?
88 Vessels that cannot contain
M: I was thinking about the institutional archive versus something that’s circulated and popularized like postcards. In the museum context, we’re used to seeing stolen objects or fragments of them such as a vessel, separated from their vernacular uses and from the people and cultures who give those objects life and meaning. It also highlights the Orientalist trope that we need our historical objects preserved by Western institutions, because we cannot be trusted to care for them ourselves.
L: Yeah. I just want the viewer to be able to look at these images differently to how they might have originally interacted with them, if at all, through an institutional archive. It’s a lot of me just working through my own questions and feelings. I didn’t start by thinking, “Oh, I’m going to make a project about the vessel.”
In Receding Illusions, they’re presented as a triptych. Slowly, the subject kind of moves to the background, and then the focus becomes gesture and object. I was thinking it is the object and the subject together that make this series interesting to me, because it’s what the subject represents but in the context of this object too and why this object was just so prominent, not like anything else. You can also see these are clearly young women. With the ceramic collage, The binding hold, I knew I wanted to collage the image of this vessel being held by many hands and held up by many hands, because it just felt really representative of all the women in these images and their relationship.
They cross the seas to watch you bring them water
M: Your large-scale screen print with the cyanotype insertions makes me think about the intervention itself being about imposed movement or about cadence and the flow of water. Something that came up for me was water as historical storytelling—something that is moving and changes as well.
L: I hadn’t thought about the water as a storyteller—that’s a really beautiful reading too. I think in some ways, the vessel also has this role as a container. And so I’m also thinking about the studio setting as a container. Water holds the shape of the vessel that it’s in, and when I think about the studio setting, I think of the subjects holding the form of what they’re told to do, how they’re positioned, and their role in that too. I think of the studio as a setting that structures and constricts movement and imposes on the women’s agency.
The binding hold
M: I think we put too much pressure on ourselves as artists to counter the entire ideological Western historical canon with our work. The process of artistic exploration, different from theorizing, is initiated from curiosity, from an emotional response. Do you experience the weight of this responsibility, and how do you create space for yourself to move beyond it?
L: I can definitely relate to that, which is why I frequently talk about needing to have a balance in my practice, when creating work that’s very critical and very heavy. Looking at these historical artifacts, and thinking about what they represented and still represent, how they’ve shaped the way a lot of people look at these images, or think about women—it can feel like a lot of pressure to try to counter this narrative. I think, for me, the artistic process is a very spiritual experience, which is why I’m drawn to it, because it’s part of my spiritual practice.
Being rooted in research and archives and working with images that are sometimes hard to engage with feels really heavy, but there’s an importance to doing it. There’s a curiosity behind it that leads me to continue, but I find that the next project I work on tends to be purely something that needs to feed my soul—something that I need to work through that looks at the world from a more, maybe, mystical lens, or a more spiritual embodiment of whatever it is. Right now, Islamic geometry is a huge focus of mine. It is replenishing a lot of what I feel depleted me in working on A Vessel to Bend Water. I’m finding that I need to do this offset process in order for me to continue to make work that is critical in nature.
M: What do you think we should implement into the way we navigate our practices as creatives and storytellers?
L: I think we need to have room to play. I had pretty much been on an artist hiatus for five years, prior to working on this project. I wanted to push myself out of thinking about photography in really rigid ways. Because a lot of times, and maybe this is just my own experience with how I was trained, but I feel like there’s so much planning and precision that goes into creating an image that I don’t necessarily know how to play when it comes to taking photos. But working with archival images, there was such an immediacy to being able to intervene, or just play. It really opened me up.
Before, I was very research and concept-oriented, versus now, I feel like process has taken a much bigger part in my practice. I feel a real intimacy with these images and with the women in these images. I’m endlessly curious about who they are, who their descendants are.
Marina Fathalla is a coptic artist and currently the Director of Programming at Whippersnapper Gallery (Toronto).