The eyes staring back from the walls of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's current featured exhibit are not pleading for your help. Rather, most of the Indian women and girls photographed by artist-activist Fazal Sheikh for the exhibit Beloved Daughters appear resigned to their fates, however harrowing. Some of the women don't look into the camera at all, the outline of their faces barely visible beneath white shrouds. Others are visible only from behind.
The show, which opens to the public on Saturday, takes up two rooms. In the first are portraits of infants to young women from Sheikh's Ladli series. The second room contains portraits of widows taken in the holy city of Vrindavan for Sheikh's Moksha series. The black and white photographs are paired with testimonies -- stories of abuse, piety, hopelessness and loss in the women's own words. Young girls speak of abandonment by their parents; widows tell of being kicked out by their children; young women share the pain of forced marriages and beatings incurred for bearing female offspring. Sheikh's photographs literally put faces to the problems of poverty and human rights that we are accustomed to hearing about in statistical form.
During a press opening this morning, exhibit curator April M. Watson
talked with an almost entirely female audience about the artist's
methods (the images are inkjet printed), his multicultural heritage
(Sheikh was born in New York City to a father who was born in Kenya whose
own father emigrated from Pakistan) and mistrust of the media. "Not you
guys," Watson added with a grin. Sheikh feels that traditional
journalists swoop in and out of situations and thus unavoidably weave
their own preconceived notions into rushed stories. Playing the role of
the concerned documentarian, Sheikh seeks to immerse himself in the
culture of his subjects and tell their stories more fully through
first-person text and penetrating images.
Beloved Daughters will be on view through September 13. The artist will speak at Atkins Auditorium on September 10. This Sunday at 1:30 p.m., Water
a film screening in conjunction with the exhibit tells the tale of a
child widow in 1938, a person whose existence may not be that different
from the modern day subjects of Sheikh's photographs.
Photo credit: "Malikh" by Fazal Sheikh
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