APPARITIONS is a provocation of the Western colonial gaze and the construction of the Other. In the words of Daniel Neugebauer in Counter Readings of the Body, ‘the gaze…appears as an adversary, a knife, the evil eye…’. The work interrogates the claim to knowledge made by the Western gaze which reads and marks bodies as savage, sexual, racial, animalistic, queer, grotesque, Oriental and ultimately dangerous. In order to fuel its own imperial male ego, the Western gaze renders the feminine ‘Middle Eastern’ body into a site of imagination. Only when she is flattened can the West enact both its sexualised fantasy of exposure and imagined fear of the unknown Other. Hidden from the gaze, she must be unveiled. Only then can the West enact its ultimate fantasy of domination. For hundreds of years, the Western empires have proliferated the gaze to render the Other’s body, and by extension the Other’s homeland, into a site justifiable of political intervention.
In a moment of agency, the performer in Apparitions wears a textile mask made in likeness to the Lion of Tell Harmal (1800 B.C), an artefact that was destroyed during the 2003 looting of the Iraq National Museum under U.S occupation. With reference to the impunity of the West’s war crimes, the lion is reanimated through the moving body and returns as a haunting of the Western institution.
Sara Jajou, ‘Apparitions’, 2025, fan, veil, video projection and light installation, dimensions variable.
SARA JAJOU is a Chaldean-futurist artist who works alongside contemporary histories and ancient futures. Lover of masks, costume and the uncanny, Jajou’s work is concerned with fantastical and mythological expressions of Otherness. Her outcomes include performance art, video projection, textiles, sculpture, installation and writing. She draws from her family history of colonial displacement and offers alternate imaginings of cultural production amidst collective trauma and loss.
References:
Neugebauer D (eds) (2021) ‘Introduction’, COUNTER_READINGS OF THE BODY, Das Neue Alphabet, 3(1):5-6.