Arsenal Contemporary Art Reveals Nine Young Artists Who Question Body Representation
Arsenal Contemporary Art is opened by appointment for its current exhibition, This Sacred Vessel (Part II), a part of a series of three exhibitions. While the first exhibition dealt with exploring how the relevance of a landscape painting is informed by ecological anxiety, the current one sheds light on figurative painting. Nine painters present their work questioning the codes and norms attached to gender and offering a new lease of life through various visions of women's bodies.
© Arsenal Contemporary Art
In an age where images of the human body are pervasive, Sarah Letovsky, Nadia Waheed and seven other artists reconfigure the symbolism of gender at the Arsenal Contemporary Art in New York. Through their skilled brushstrokes, they challenge several norms and perceptions around the human body. Waheed, one of the nine artists whose work is exhibited at the gallery, questions the meaning of being a woman through her paintings.
Conceptions: What Is a Woman?
Waheed spent her early life in various cities, namely Islamabad, Paris, Cairo and some cities of the US. As she moved from one country to another, the absurdity of some norms became obvious to her. Every culture had its own conception of what a woman is, and Waheed set out to explore and confront those conceptions.
“Society, as a whole, views women as a means to an end; a wife designed to serve, a mother designed to sacrifice everything for her children, a daughter designed to marry a good son of a good family, a woman designed to be entirely selfless — thinking only of others and never of herself”, Waheed concluded.
Rules Attached to Conceptions: What to Say, What to Wear and How to Act
Unfortunately, these conceptions have certain rules attached to them. For instance, Waheed was policed, from a very young age, on the type of clothes she can wear, the topics she can talk about and even the poses she can
strike in photos. If she dared to disobey, she’d be categorized as an ‘immoral type of girl with poor values and a poor sense of thinking’. “The type of girl who’s met with a shrug of the shoulders and a “Well, she’s that type of girl” whenever something bad happens to her,” Waheed says.
© Nadia Waheed
© Nadia Waheed
© Nadia Waheed
Question relationships to other bodies
In her work, Waheed rejects the idea of a woman as a means to an end. Each woman that she paints serves only herself. She has her own life, her own will and she is nobody’s mother, wife, or daughter. She is free from the projections of ideas attributed to her body. In fact, one of Waheed’s paintings depicts a woman cutting her braid, a traditional beauty symbol for women in Pakistan, as a move signifying liberation.
In other paintings, Waheed shows pubic hair, a subject that remains a taboo in many countries. “We all grow pubic hair. I find it shocking that the majority of women remove the entirety of their hair. We live in a society that infantilizes women”, Waheed says. Although Waheed plays with the symbol of the human body, she insists on painting women naked. “The nudity is a symbol for my fundamental acceptance of myself as I am”, Waheed adds.
Today, Waheed lives in the US and produces work that questions the liberty an individual possesses to act freely, the norms attached to women's bodies, the pressure imposed on females to follow those norms and the impact it has over them. Her questioning leads to quite a lot of backlash though. When a female artist attempts to diversify the nude, she sometimes receives messages demanding her to dress the women in her paintings appropriately. In fact, Waheed received messages saying that she is shameless or “a whore painting whores”. Waheed’s work is a primary example that wasn’t just contested but also temporarily banned on Instagram, twice. This isn’t the first time an artist experienced their work being censured on a social media platform. In fact, a journalist from the New York Times recently resigned because of the pressure of the Twittersphere on determining what a journal publishes. Since social media show individuals what they want to see and what matches their views, the disparity in opinions and the lack of self-questioning might be one of the biggest problems of the 21st century.
Nadia Waheed’s, and eight other artists’ work, is exhibited at the Arsenal Contemporary Art in New York until September 2020.
© Nadia Waheed
© Nadia Waheed
Other artists exhibited at Arsenal Contemporary Art
Shelley Adler (b. 1961 in Edmonton, AB lives and works in Toronto, ON). Her work has been exhibited at Metivier Gallery (Toronto), Jochen Hempel (Berlin), at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto).
Kim Dorland (b. 1974 in Wainwright, AB, lives and works in Toronto, ON). Notable exhibitions include Terror Management at Beers (London), Get Out at Antoine Ertaskiran (Montreal) and Kim Dorland: Everyday Monsters at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.
Bambou Gili (b. 1996 in New York, lives and works in New York). Her work has been shown at NYU Curatorial (New York) and Wallplay (New York).
Humour is present in the work of Bambou Gili. Moments of trepidation and relaxation in which the figures confront the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer enliven Gili’s cerulean tableaux.
Eliza Griffiths (b. 1965 in London, England, lives and works in Montreal, QC). Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Mercer Union (Toronto), The Painting Center (New York), Hallways Contemporary Arts Centre (Buffalo), ARCO Madrid, the Saidye Bronfman Centre (Montreal) and Platform Gallery (London).
Sarah Letovsky (b. 1987 in Toronto, ON, lives and works in Toronto) She was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Patel Gallery (Toronto) and Casey House (Toronto).
Walter Scott (b. 1985 in Toronto, ON lives and works in Toronto). He has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions at Cooper Cole (Toronto), I.S.C.P (Brooklyn), Remai Modern (Saskatoon) and Plug In ICA (Winnipeg).
Marion Wagschal (b. 1943 in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad, lives and works in Montreal, QC). Major exhibitions include Marion Wagschal at the Musée d’art de Joliette, L’éclatement des frontières, 1965-2000 at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and Art and Feminism at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2014-2015, her work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition presented at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Janet Werner (b. 1959 in Winnipeg, MB, lives and works in Montreal). This year, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art opened a retrospective exhibition of her work. Her work has been shown at MASS MoCA (North Adams), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and Plug In ICA (Winnipeg).
Sources: https://www.arsenalcontemporary.com/ny/exhib/detail/exhib/detail/this-sacred-vessel-pt2 and https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/nadia-waheed/