Revisiting The Encyclopedic Museum

On the left is the egyptian exhibit at the 1889 world Expo in Paris. On the right is a real street in Cairo. This is from Timothy Mitchell’s Colonizing Egypt. He talks about two Egyptian tourists in Paris who witness themselves displayed; how they respond to the conflict of the return of the gaze and what happens when the orient looks back and acknowledges how he/she is perceived. The Egyptian tourists were more disturbed by how authentic the pavillion was—as if they had no idea that the French had been studying them so closely. They are thrust into the orientalist world of staring. They could no longer exist outside, world-as-exhibition.
This is the premise of the studio: World as exhibition is a colonial product: the encyclopedic museum as an instrument of empire. The orientalization of the other into world as exhibition exists within a colonial apparatus of knowledge. And the didactic purpose of expos and museums enables a discourse to be constructed through authority. It becomes an academic construction. It becomes learned. But we are within the apparatus to gain tools. We must study legacies of discursive colonization—how our thinking is colonized. And that begins the process of unlearning. And we do this by constantly tethering lines.

A good place to start is by putting these two pieces next to each other. On the left is DeLacroix’s painting, Les Femmes d’Alger (1834), in which he never actually painted them in said location. He painted them in Paris as an imagined construction of the Orient. On the right is Lalla Essaydi’s Les Femmes du Maroc photograph which critiques DeLacroix’s painting as a constructed narrative showing white women in neutral colors posing as orientalist subjects. It is easy to “unlearn” through curation, in this sense. Curatorially, putting these two next to each other is a fine place to start. We tether this line by putting them next to each other.

As both pieces are collaged into each other and both constructed narratives, one being a critique of the orientalist problem, look back at each other and start constructing a third narrative within the binaries of self/other. 1 + 1 > 2. That’s another line tethered.

In an attempt to spatialize this, this final collage is really what turned the conceptual argument into a spatial argument. The now open door in the back shows me or a reflection of me taking a photo of a constructed narrative unveiling the constructed narrative it critiques, that now includes myself, which is the 5th line tethered.

GRADUATE, STUDIO V, FALL 15
CRITIC: ZIAD JAMALEDDINE