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PROFILEImages - Courtesy of the artist and the Sabrina Amrani Gallery. Writer - Dalia Hashim, editor and linguist.

Amina Benbouchta: Chrysalis

An affective understanding of the female voice through silence and empty spaces

She is not there, the woman you see in the frame. Sitting or standing, masked or hidden by a rug or her hair, the puppet-person is always isolated, ambiguous and composite, invoking the loneliness of generations of Middle Eastern women entrenched in their invisibility in public life and its harsh division of space. This is Amina Benbouchta’s deliberate way ‘to name and shame the status of women.’ Like many feminists, she believes that the female voice truly finds the space to exist in absence, silence and obscure empty spaces—hence our imagined protagonist: the absentee.

That is why Benbouchta’s series Chrysalis is both whimsical and uncanny. The figure you see is not an individual, but a compendium of ‘characters that are easily identifiable by their attributes,’ she explains. Meet her avatars: a set of archetypes of the female experience ‘that evoke a puppet on a string obeying the puppet master.’ This series conjures up the different stages of a woman’s life, but it is also meant to work like a game of Tarot. Just like in the visceral Tarot, we are encouraged to ask, ‘what does each of them stand for? Why are the characters hidden and faceless?’

Certain objects reappear as tropes in Benbouchta’s art, becoming familiar like the characters seen on Tarot cards: the Hermit, the Lovers, the Empress and so on. A few years ago, she also realised this running theme; but recognised, too, that the oversimplified symbols of domestic life in her work—the corsets, tables, chairs and beds—were continually devoid of a human presence.

The deeply personal Chrysalis—which Benbouchta dedicates to her lonely six-year-old self—is a staged attempt to fill a void; putting one thing in place of another.

Benbouchta describes the nexus between the objects, the environment and the figure in her work as a ‘poetry of chance.’ The intentionally inoffensive and aesthetically pleasing images allow even the most cryptic messages to emerge from a steady and subtle reading. To impose a logical and algorithmic—or ‘masculine,’ as she puts it—framework is radically to miss the point. To extract meaning, you have to read the in-between, what is not said. It is affect rather than logic that will help us to decipher Benbouchta’s symbolic language and to bear witness to the social control and false myths of beauty that ensnare the woman in her daily life.

The awkward crinoline-prison that hems in the figure consumes all her faculties. The viewer is denied the intimate engagement with her that we crave. To look into her eyes and to sustain dialogue, person-to-person, is impossible. Perhaps the choice to hide her in plain sight is Benbouchta’s way of subverting the act of looking itself—to drive us to understand the menace of our own gaze on the female body. ‘From your reaction, I can tell that I have touched something that I wanted to touch,’ retorts Benbouchta. Bemused by the heuristic artistry at work here, I recall the black mask and bear trap, and feel the puppet master’s tug on my own skin.

The absentee’s existence and identity hinge ironically on the banal objects in her remit— things that also depend on her for purpose. She can use only what is readily available in a confined space both to act and to act out. Try as she may to transgress, her will is limited and relegated to the brush, the cushion, the heart and so on. The struggle in this ideological field may be that even in a realm of possibilities, our heroine remains a stereotype.

Yet ‘my art aims at giving visibility to what is invisible,’ Benbouchta says. In the presence of duality, seeing the positive possibilities depends on your perspective. That fiery, almost manic, red hair and the wild bush may hark back to the hysterical Freudian woman. But they are also a tribute to women fleeing a male-oriented psychoanalytical reading of their lives. We are reminded that ‘the female voice flows in spite of the devices used to contain it. The idea of a moving metamorphosis, a fluid change of states, is a metaphor of hope, of the constant possibilities of evolution. Movement is hope.’

Chrysalis speaks of the universal condition of women; but it also speaks for all individuals suffering under patriarchal control, anywhere and at any time. The gallery of faceless characters presents the viewer with a variety and so the points of identification are abundant.

The hard outer case that encloses the chrysalis is only temporary. When the butterfly finally emerges, she flies.

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Chrysallis VI from the series Chrysallis (2015) Archival pigment print 22.5 x 15.5 cm

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