THE VEIL: Visible & Invisible Spaces - A Traveling Art Exhibition
ABOUT
The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces is an exhibition,
curated by Jennifer Heath, of thirty-six works of art, each of which considers
The Veil, its many manifestations and interpretations and puts veils and
veiling into context.
Visible and Invisible Spaces intends to engage received
wisdom about the veil - particularly current clichés and stereotypes
about Islamic practices - and to reflect on the great ubiquity, importance
and profundity of the veil throughout human history and imagination. Visible
and Invisible Spaces asks artists to investigate the veil in its broadest
contexts. The exhibition will be divided into three categories to be interpreted
widely: The Sacred Veil, The Sensuous Veil , and The Sociopolitical Veil.
Visible and Invisible Spaces, however, is not a documentary
exhibition.
Visible and Invisible Spaces is a visual companion to Heath's
edited volume, The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics
(University of California Press, forthcoming 2008). The exhibition, Visible
and Invisible Spaces, invited visual artists - including videographers,
filmmakers and new media artists, as well as painters, sculptors, performance
and installation artists - from around the world to investigate and re-vision
the veil.
The veil is infinitely visual, yet it is also a means of concealment.
The veil is itself mystery, even as it is the shroud that guards the mystery.
Veiling is found everywhere and begins in Nature - such as eclipses and
the periodic shedding of animals' outer bodily layer (feathers, skin,
fur or horn) before re-growth. As much as the veil is fabric or a garment,
the veil is also a concept. Veils can be illusion, divination, vanity,
artifice, architecture, clothing, hair, deception, curtains, magic, alchemy
and transformation, dream, euphemism and metaphor, depression, hallucination,
masquerade, beauty, eloquent silence, holiness, birth, liberation, imprisonment.
Veils are the ethers beyond consciousness, the hidden hundredth name of
god, the final passage into death, even the biblical apocalypse - the
lifting of god's veil to signal the "end times."
To be veiled is, to some degree, to be unseen, the condition of both great
attraction and repulsion. The artists featured in Visible and Invisible
Spaces will speak to these myriad aspects of the veil and more.
Visible and Invisible Spaces begins traveling in 2008. Didactics
will be provided and each artist offers a statement describing how her
work relates to the veil. The exhibition provides a wonderful opportunity
for community and co-curricular activities.
For more about The Veil: Visible & Invisible Spaces, please see http://cultureid.com.