• Lalla Essaydi was born in Morocco, raised in Saudi Arabia, and trained in Paris and Boston.
• She works with photography, but not as a passive observer.
• She uses Arabic calligraphy, historically denied to women, as an act of reclamation

In the world of art — especially Western art — Arab women were often present, but voiceless. They appeared in paintings, photographs, and literature as decorative, passive, and exotic. They were seen, but not heard.

Lalla Essaydi steps into this frame, challenging it with her art.

As a young woman navigating life in Morocco and Saudi Arabia, Essaydi experienced firsthand gender dominance and boundaries placed around women .

When she moved to Paris and later Boston to study art, Essaydi didn’t leave her culture behind. Instead, she brought it with her — and used the tools of Western art education to examine, question, and ultimately reframe the visual narratives she had grown up with.

She used photography. to construct tableaux. The women in her images wear white as a blank canvas. She writes Arabic calligraphy across their skin, fabric, and walls. The text isn’t there to be read.
It is a form of resistance and challenge to the viewer. 

Essaydi returns to her roots.  She doesn’t reject her cultural heritage — she interrogates it, reframes it, and expands it. She gives voice — visually, textually, and silently — to the women who have been flattened by centuries of misrepresentation.

Lalla Essaydi’s work is visually stunning.

• The fabric is chosen with precision.
• The poses recall classical Orientalist paintings
• The calligraphy is deliberate and defiant.
• The photographic silence is intentional — a refusal to explain, a demand to be seen on her own terms.

Where 19th-century Orientalist artists imagined Arab women through fantasy and fetish, Essaydi responds not with noise, but with control. She doesn’t destroy the past. She rewrites it.

Rewriting the story from inside.