An interview with Soukaina Joual

Soukaina Joual is a current artist-in-residency at Residency.ch in PROGR, supported by Pro Helvetia. In a conversation with a curator Anna Fatyanova she will speak about her artistic practice.

Anna Fatyanova: In your statement you write: “Her work interrogates how the body is psychically, socially, sexually and representationally produced. How the bodies can find their place in the chaos of individual desires, political constraints and social conventions and how to create universal and personal images of the body.”
So, would you say that ‘The Body’ is the focus of your work? The body as a political and social actor. As a female artist, are you focusing on the representation of the female body mainly?

Soukaina Joual: Yes I would say that is the main focus in my practice.
At the start of my artistic career, I was more interested in the body as flesh; what is underneath and beyond the skin. I used meat as a medium, and I was inspired by imagery from butchers’ shops and what to think of its aesthetics. I found it both intriguing and disturbing at the same time. It was also its political connotations that drew more to it, as it acted as a manifestation of what was going on at the time during the Arab Spring.

Throughout my projects, I then started questioning what is a body and how political it can be. What is the difference between private and public spaces, emptiness and the hidden, and how to deconstruct the body to reveal something anew.

AF: I like very much your performance in Korea – it feels to me that it accumulates all the questions you are dealing with: presence and absence, body as a space, as a mirror. In the performance, are you hiding one part of your body but at the same time multiplying the bodies of others?

SJ: During my residency in Seoul in 2016, I witnessed massive anti-government protests. Thousands of South Koreans called for President Park Geun-hye’s resignation. The march — which included families with young children, students, etc.— came in opposition to Park’s administration.

Incarnation is a four-hour-long performance that took place on the 12th of November, during one of the biggest protests the country has witnessed in decades. I wasn’t presented as a citizen nor as an artist but as an incarnation; using my body as an object. People couldn’t see my face and I couldn’t see theirs either. I was reflecting everything surrounding me through a mirror box that was placed above my head.

AF: Your project Awrah is based on the book “Ways of Seeing” by John Berger. The book which you stumbled upon in a private library was censored, with some body parts hidden under white stickers. But even the title of the book is so uncanny that the very act of censoring responds in a sense to that title. Could you tell me more about that?

SJ: Awrah is an Arabic word, it refers to things that need to be covered. Like the body of a woman, her voice, a place, etc.

“Ways of Seeing” studies the representation of nude female bodies in art history, in the oil paintings of Botticelli, Manet, among others, as well as in advertising images. When I stumbled upon this book, I discovered that all nude paintings, drawings and photographs were censored. This happened because the previous owner of the book ordered it online, and the white stickers were censored by the Qatari customs on entry.

Through this act of censorship, the book has lost its imagery yet gained a new reading, a new narrative. This project is an attempt to address the representation of the nude female body in contemporary Arab societies. I was trying to question how nudity is perceived and whether the creation of a universal and personal image of the body is possible.

In an act of resistance to the imposed censorship, I tried to retrace the covered parts of the images—mostly female private parts with pencil over photocopies of the book.

AF: So, the end of your residency at the guest apartment Residency.ch you will also have an exhibition at the art space Dreiviertel at the end of November. Do you already know art you will show there?

SJ: The work that I will be showing at Dreiviertel is a continuous development of the previous projects “Awrah” and the “Adam and Eve” miniatures.

“Em/body/ies” is about the perception of the female body over time, across cultures and throughout art history. Appropriated from Greek sculpture, to Renaissance drawing and painting, to the Persian, Indian and Islamic illuminated manuscripts. In most Arab societies, the visual representation of living beings is forbidden, and thus the bodies of holy figures are often visible, but their faces are covered with a veil, out of reverence and respect.

Here in these miniatures, I try to create a subject matter using nudes from the classical Renaissance paintings & photos of human anatomy. The miniatures depict multiple superimposed nude female bodies in various positions —standing, laying, crouching, sitting— in an amorphous yet contained space, so they might seem to be in motion. The womens’ bodies are portrayed in a state of nudity, whether in groups or in pairs where they appear stripped and exposed, huddled in a surface of a fleshy color that turns into an open space, in a moment of intimacy. The naked bodies move in and out of focus, and blend in a way until they almost become one flesh.

The overlaid bodies are not vertistic, intentionally. I use it as a means to abstract the usual depiction of female bodies. I try to manipulate the forms of figurative representations to present new ways of looking at nudity, or other expressions of embodiment.

AF: You are also part of an artist group, K-oh-llective, where you help other artists by providing information on open calls and current grants, among other things. Can you tell me more about it?

SJ: K-oh-llective is a group of five independent artists, and mostly very good friends who came together in 2020. We all shared a desire to facilitate collective conversations around art practices. We use our platform for resource-sharing among artists, writers and curators in Egypt and the Arab world who are in need of this content and critical discourse. The platform features an open- source library with a database of essential tools for arts practitioners, as well as a selection of podcasts, texts and discussions.

AF: Thank you very much for an interesting talk!

The interview was held by Anna Fatyanova

Website:
www.soukainajoual.com

Exhibition:
Soukaina Joual & Nada Elkalaawy – Duologue
Vernissage: 27. November ab 19 Uhr
https://dreiviertel.ch/

Veröffentlicht unter Allgemein, residency.ch
Schlagwörter: residency.ch