The project “Awrah عورة” started after stumbling upon a found copy of John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” ; in which the author studies the representation of naked female bodies in oil paintings (Botticelli, Manet...) as well as in advertising images. While exploring this book I discovered that all the paintings and drawings with nude bodies were censored, the sensitive body parts were hidden by white stickers. This happened when the book was checked by the Qatari customs. This discovery brought up several questions related to the way the body is treated in the history of art, and how the act of censorship directed towards a taboo triggers more curiosity to see the unraveling of what’s hidden underneath.

Although the Arab civilization opened up to the human body for scientific research (e.g: Avicenna, Arrazi…), the contemporary Arab society still holds a negative perception of the body. In fact, talking about sex in the gaze that Islam poses on the body is very essential, because around it everything else is created,  according to the exegesis of the VII century Al-Qotbî: "what God created first in man is his sex" the sex is a hole in Arabic (farj), a “incision”. We cannot think of the body in Islam other than sexed or Awrah (Nakedness).

Through this project, I’m trying to interrogate how naked bodies are represented in contemporary Arab society, how the body is psychically, socially, sexually and representationally produced, and how can we rethink our way of looking at nudity.