Guardian: Paris’s most elusive street artist, Princess Hijab, slaps black Muslim veils on the half-naked airbrushed women – and men – of the metro’s fashion adverts at night. She calls it “hijabisation”. Her guerrilla niqab art has been exhibited from New York to Vienna, sparking debates about feminism and fundamentalism.
“I use veiled women as a challenge,” she says, quick to add that she believes no one way of dressing is either good or bad. She’s not defending the rights of any group and no one needs her as a spokesperson. “The veil has many hidden meanings, it can be as profane as it is sacred, consumerist and sanctimonious. From Arabic Gothicism to the condition of man. The interpretations are numerous and of course it carries great symbolism on race, sexuality and real and imagined geography.”
Beyond the arguments about whether Muslim women should cover their heads, Sarkozy’s new ministry of “immigration and national identity” and his national debate on what it means to be French has stigmatised the already discriminated and ghettoised young people of third- and fourth-generation immigrant descent. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe, but the prevailing anti-immigrant discourse, and what many view as a pointless burqa ban, has increased the feelings of marginalisation felt by young Muslims and minorities. “We definitely can’t keep closing off and putting groups in boxes, always reducing them to the same old questions about religion or urban violence. Education levels are better and we can’t have the old Manichean discourse any more. Liberty, equality, fraternity, that’s a republican principle, but in reality the issue of minorities in French society hasn’t really evolved in half a century. The outsiders in France are still the poor, the Arabs, black and of course, the Roma.”
She won’t say what her own roots are. She simply says she sees her work as a kind of “cartography of crime” a mapping out of the underbelly of the city where “I bring inside everything that’s been excreted out.”
And yet her graffiti is particularly French in its anti-consumerism and ad-busting stance. For her, painting a veil on adverts works visually because the two are “dogmas that can be questioned”. She feels young women wearing the hijab who were once stigmatised by French institutions are now being targeted for their purchasing power, the “perfect customers” in France’s increasingly consumerist society.
trop bien, ca.
(via exercisesinnarcissism)
