Cartographies of cloth : mapping the veil in contemporary art

The veil is a historically constructed site, a fixed sign used in Euro-America to conveniently and clearly dress the borders between east and west. Recent disciplines like visual and cultural studies, Third World feminism, and postcolonialism have challenged this assumption positing instead the veil's polysemy and its different sometimes multiple meanings according to the individual, and the historical and geographical context. Representations of the veil in contemporary art have appeared quite frequently in Euro-America in the last couple of decades, and in the thesis I set out to demonstrate that many of these visual texts also propose significant reinscriptions of the sign capable of displacing dominant discourse. However, because of the veil's metonymy in Euro-American mainstream culture and 'collective gaze,' the thesis first charts the topography of the trope in history, discourse and visual culture as its entrenchment obviously complicates any use of the sign by artists of Muslim origin exhibiting within the western art apparatus. It then traces three alternative narratives of the veil evident in contemporary practice underscoring their critical importance with regards to gender, politics, representation and the conception of self. I must however concede that the major impetus behind the analyses of the contextualized veil, the postcolonial veil and the subject-ive veil is a belief in the radical power of visual texts to facilitate transnational literacy and translation. The study therefore focuses on the relationship between the location -territorial or ideological- of the gaze and the image. It demonstrates that this relationship or space is protean, plural and full of promise both individually and collectively