.ABOUT MARTINE STIG

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SISTERS About Martine Stigs latest series of photographs The place of women in the Islam has become in Occidental countries an over-mediated though under-debated issue. Although much has been written and published about the subject, the focus has alarmingly remained the same. Really, there seems to be no dissent about the subject matter: the Enlightened Occident has the right at a time of a war on terror to define its new enemy in terms of its lack of ethics concerning women's treatment. One of the most obvious pieces of evidence for these claims lies in the realm of the visual: women have to wear burqas, an alleged obligation that stands for women's repression in the Islam. By impeding women to cover an identity on their own in the public realm, the burqa, that hides the feature of their face, is said to ultimately turn them into anonymity and therefore inexistence. But what is these women's own understanding of the situation? Do they feel that their identity has been stolen or is it a matter of understanding identity in other terms? Dutch artist Martine Stig (b. 1972) has travelled to Kuwait and has investigated issues of gender, representation and their relation to the technology of photography in the Islamite society. The result is to be seen this month at Motive Gallery in Amsterdam, under the form of a series of board-size photographs called Sisters. Since her studies at the Koninklijke Academie for fine arts in The Hague, Martine Stig has been interested in the technology of photography and the way it produces - or eludes - a certain knowledge about the self and society. After (1998) is a series of photographs taken by couples just after having had sex. The photographs from the series Men (1999) and Hello (2000) function as visual metaphor for people's contradictory relation to photography and its way to fix or create a certain individual or social identity. Bloos (2002) consists in a series of portraits of people blushing that again reflects upon the potential - or impossibility? - of the photographical medium to evoke or reveal what is invisible to the eye because already past or because relating to the physiology or emotional life of the self. Since 2003 with her series Thai Girls, Martine Stig has become interested in the issue of the representation of the exotic woman and how it is possible to appropriate visual stereotypes for different purposes. With her last series Sisters, Stig investigates the role of photography in women's life in a society which proscribes them to have a face in the public realm. Does this imply that these women do not have an identity on their own in the frame of their culture? What is the social role of photography then if their public identity is not related to their facial features? The pictures from the series Sisters constitute portraits of girls from Kuwait, that all wear burqas. In Sisters this subject matter literalizes the play between description and suggestion, between what is visible and invisible that has always been central to Stig's work. Beyond these questions, what strikes the viewer in these photographs is a sense of intimacy and joy that is most of times absent from works with a similar subject matter. The viewer is placed at the same height as the subjects depicted, who look straight into the camera. The body language of the girls, their ease and the casual aesthetics of the photographs remind us strongly of home pictures. Though we cannot appreciate the whole of their facial features, these girls endear us. With a minimum of visual effects, Stig has been able to portray them in a way that we can relate to them and to the way they seem to recognise and identify each other. Thereby, they cover a new place in the western viewer's imaginary as we feel compelled to look and look again. While keeping on with her previous experiments on the importance of images and the technology of photography in constructing - alternative - individual and social identities, Martine Stig opens new horizons for a better understanding between communities in increasing conflict. By playing on the viewer's visual expectations, the series Sisters makes possible to look at the 'woman in burqa' other according to parameters that are familiar to us: that, even when they are more overtly related to gender and religious issues, questions of fashion are a matter of choice. Thereby, unlike many others, Martine Stig doesn't impose a moral on viewers but invite them to challenge their ways of seeing. Text by Catherine Somzé published in Tubelight # 43, march, april 2006

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