Hareem… Hareem
حريم… حريم
The starting point was Gustave Flaubert's 1850 letter to his mother from Egypt, and Edward Said's writing on Orientalism: the white skin as a fact that fixes an intellectual attitude toward two worlds. In the performance the artist replaces the brush with flesh, colour with movement, language with voice.
Ahmed Fouad Selim wrote of it: Rasha Ragab resorted to the portraits drawn by the Orientalists and fluctuated among Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Renoir and Gérôme, and even Picasso.
The piece was shown in Cairo, then at a visual-arts university in London, and again in Paris.
