The representations of Harem’s wife in contemporary Magrebian artistic practice

Abstract

Artists have changed their position towards art and collaborated  in unsettling the cultural landscape in domains such as literature, music, cinema or plastic art .By struggling against prohibitions, their freedom of speech has left room to a creative force .They have become  masters of their past, their present, their future and even of their bodies. By carrying out a selection of maghrebian contemporary artistic works, in which the body enters a particularly significant dialogue to our eyes, with the calligraphic letter.

  Through the analyses of the orientalists representations of the closed and private space of the "harem», this article will attempt, on the basis of the studies of the works of the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi, and of the observations of certain contemporary works of Lalla Essaydi and Madjida Khattani, to present a better image of the Harem woman and how the female artists use the writing as a medium of the reconstruction of a new body image.

Key words: orientalist’s representations, harem, the imaginary, contemporary artistic practices, female artist, the Maghrebian woman.