4 - Corporeal Resistance and Aesthetics of the Interface

Summary

The final chapter explores the relationship between the work of art and its diverse spectators by developing the idea of the ‘multi-layered interface’. I argue that this work engages spectators in ways that move beyond previous theory and practice examining images of the body. I focus on performance in photography and video, exhibited in galleries or disseminated online. This art negotiates a way between a complex web of icons, from Samuel Aranda’s photograph of a fully veiled Yemeni woman holding her injured son, to the controversial naked selfies posted on social media by certain women from Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. Lalla Essaydi and Majida Khattari develop a complex interface through Arabic writing, photography and a range of French, other European, or Arabic and Persian imagery, in interaction with the performing body. New means of concealing and revealing the body evoke the revolutions in Tunisia, Libya or Syria in photographic work by Mouna Karray and videos by Naziha Arebi and Philip Horani. Online videos of street art and dance (by Ahl Al Kahf, El Seed, JR and Art Solution) at public sites in Tunisia interpolate their diverse audience in comparable ways, while extending the work in time and space.