Huis Marseille is showing the first solo museum exhibition of work by the Yemeni-Egyptian-American artist Yumna Al-Arashi (1988, Washington D.C.). In Body as Resistance Al-Arashi makes use of a wide variety of media – photography, book and sculpture – to oppose the oppression and stereotyping of women that she observes worldwide. She focuses on the ways the Arab world is depicted, explores the legacy of colonialism in our thoughts, and contemplates matriarchal traditions that are all but lost. Al-Arashi’s work switches effortlessly between registers – sometimes playful and provocative, sometimes poetic, defiant or enraged – and more often than not, all of these things at once.

This powerful, delicate publication, inspired by Al-Arashi’s great-grandmother, Aisha, is an homage to the lineage of women that she descends from; women of the multidimensional and many-layered landscapes of the MENA region. Searching for an understanding of the tattoos that graced her great-grandmother’s body, Al-Arashi embraces the complexities of a symbolic matriarchal tradition. Unable to visit one of her places of origin, the war-stricken Yemen, Yumna traveled through Northern Africa meeting and photographing a diverse group of women belonging more or less to the same generation: all standing, sitting, looking, moving and laughing with assuredness and joy. By refusing the violence of selection and definition surrounding women’s practices, Al-Arashi publishes every single photograph from her journey in this 392 page monograph, moving the work into an ethereal cinematic celebration.

Al-Arashi’s images are gentle yet strong in composition, conscientiously connecting the woman to the land surrounding her and vice versa; they are incredibly rich in detail and color; and they are intimate, beautifully defiant and full of community and alliance. Aisha also includes Al-Arashi’s writing and poetry in which she reflects on memories of her great-grandmother and the scent of oudh “that left a trail of magic wherever she floated in that home.” In her genre-stretching texts, Al-Arashi also speaks on colonial archives, intergenerational storytelling and on the complexities of transnational female identity in patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist societies at-large.

• Yumna Al-Arashi – Aisha
• Published by Edition Patrick Frey
• Texts by Yumna Al-Arashi
• Softcover
• 23.2 × 16.5 cm
• 320 colour photographs
• 392 pages
• English, Arabic