.about
WaWa Series
with Khalid Al Gharaballi
A series of Kuwaiti couple portraits exploring the relationship between the overt imagery of today’s Arab pop female icons and the covert imagery of Arab lesbianism.
At the beginning of the 2000s, a major shift occurred in the marketing of female Arab pop stars. This was when their imagery played further into lazy gender stereotypes, producing a steady flow of hyper-infantilized starlets wallowing in self-inflicted misogyny appealing to the lowest common denominator. This was a definite departure from most of their Golden Age predecessors, who although pandered to gender stereotypes on some level, were still encased in lofty idealism and poetic subtleties. In contrast to the well-documented, Googlelable Arab female pop phenomena across the decades, the imagery of Arab lesbianism is all but nonexistent. These portraits address this gap but are also a fantasy pastiche of butch/femme dynamics grafted onto iconic album cover homages. Here the femme partner in the portrait is highlighted, in her role as a fan girl yearning for the über-femininity of her current pop idol, while her butch partner is in the role of the lustful, male consumer.
WaWa Complex, 2011
C-Print
30 x 50 inches
Edition 1 of 3
Dala3 (in Vegas), 2011
C-Print
34 x 50 inches
Edition 1 of 3