Lot 161: Raeda Saadeh , Palestinian B. 1977 Mona Lisa

signed, titled, dated 2007 and numbered 5/7 on a label affixed to the reverse

measurements note overall: 106 by 81cm.; 41 3/4 by 31 7/8 in.

Stockholm, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Fleeing Away from What Bothers You Most, 2007
The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, No Man's Land?, 2008
Algiers, Musée d'Art Moderne & Contemporain d'Algers, L'Art au Féminin, 2007-2008, illustration of another example on the front cover

Private Collection, London

Part of a photographic series inspired by eminent masterpieces of the sixteenth and eighteenth century masters such as Da Vinci, Vermeer and Nattier, Raeda Saadeh re-enacts here the most renowned painting in the history of art, The Mona Lisa.
Originally from Um al-Fahem-a small conservative Muslim town in the Galilee- and Israeli by adoption, Raeda Saadeh moved away from her hometown to study at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Ever since, the artist engaged in exploring a sphere that broke with the social norms and values of conservative Muslim society. Her artistic practice has evolved around gender representation within the socio-political Palestinian context and the very re-enactment of the Mona Lisa conveys the artist's quest for personal, social and political change. But above all, it articulates the artist's need to escape from the confinement of her own reality. The present work is therefore a poignant testimony of an artistic resistance against religious dogma, and the limitations it places on women in general and herself in particular.

Saadeh has mastered in the present work the juxtaposition of aesthetic beauty and emotional struggle with the use of a static pose and a deeply restrained body language. The replication of this icon of Western culture is intended to stress the inability to relate to the wider scope of symbols affiliated to this very picture. And it therefore reflects a strong desire to belong to a culture which would allow stepping away from the restrictions of her own suppressed identity-The lifetime incarceration of being a Palestinian in Israel and an Israeli in Palestine. Cultural displacement is palpable and the artist skilfully depicted in the present work the sparkling tension between aesthetics and representation.