In response to Western focus on the veil as a sign and tool of women's oppression, Bailey, codirector of London's African and Asian Visual Arts Archive, and Tawadros, founding director of the Institute of International Visual Arts, put together an exhibition of artists from a variety of nationalities who have worked with its tensions and contradictions. Veiled women sit at The Last Supper, as composed by London-born artist Faisal Abdu'Allah; a film still shows a journalist wearing a burqa in Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar; women in shorts also wear black veils in Iraqi-born artist Jananne Al'Ani's black-and-white photographs; a photo by Moroccan-born, Paris-based artist Majida Khattari has a young woman with a mesh green net pulled tightly over her head—it is titled "1001 Sufferings of Tchadiri." Seven essays by a variety of scholars, while sometimes jargon-heavy, ask difficult and incisive questions. Harvard Divinity School professor Leila Ahmed deconstructs "The Discourse of the Veil," tracing it to Qassim Amin's 1899 text "The Liberation of Woman," while Alison Donnell, of Britain's Nottingham Trent University, inquires into "Visibility, Violence and Voice?: Attitudes to Veiling Post–11 September." Her tentative conclusion is convincing: "In light of political failure, perhaps cultural interventions can bring change to the pattern through which Muslim women only achieve Western visibility by suffering violence." (May 1)
