Final Project: Censorship
Second Layer:
“Now” written in Arabic across images of veiled women.
Third Layer:
“1960s, 1970s, 1980s” written in Arabic across images from the Middle East’s cultural renaissance, featuring images of concerts, actresses, pop stars, and talk show stills.
Fourth Layer:
Original Middle Eastern media from 1955, depicting an uncensored woman.
Reference images: Modern Censorship of the female body in Middle Eastern Media.
My project, titled “Censorship,” is a multimedia performance piece showing the regression of culture in the Middle East. I built stackable layers of media using foam core to represent this sequence, starting with a layer of solid black to represent the censorship of the female body in Middle Eastern media, followed by a second layer featuring veiled women, followed by a third layer of collaged old Middle Eastern cultural icons and events, finally ending with a fifth layer of original Middle Eastern media from 1955 featuring an uncensored woman. The layers were uncovered as a track of Arabic traditional music emerged from silence. In this project, I considered time as a medium of story telling, and uncovering a story piece by piece through time.
