Fabrics of Dislocation: A Biography of Appearance Available to Purchase

This photo essay is an attempt to register the complex political valences of certain shared formal preoccupations in the cinematic, photographic, videographic, and new media works/interventions of Shirin Neshat, Lalla Essaydi, Mona Hatoum, Ana Lily Amirpour, Amina Sboui, and Nadia El Fani. What is contested here is the so-called readability of images, especially those by Middle Eastern women, as these coalesced during the late colonial and postcolonial periods and as they continue today. The “photo-grams” that constitute the essay function neither as illustrations nor as counter-readings, but as frames of a lost or imagined film these filmmaker-photographer-new media activists might have made—despite or perhaps because of their political-geographical-temporal dispersion—as a kind of collective.