Provocative Lalla is back in town, having deepened her project of clearing a space for representing Arab women as self-possessed individuals who yet are enveloped in the texts of their culture. Lalla knows whereof she visualizes; a thoroughly postmodern and globalized Moroccan, she injects piercing emotion into her rich color-scenario photographic portraits by covering her subjects in flowing fabrics that she inscribes with precise and elegant Arabic script while at the same time leaving their inscribed faces sharply conspicuous and unmistakably differentiated in feeling. The juxtaposition between culture and personality is not dissonant or strident; whether her subjects are sorrowful, meditative or gently seductive, they seem to be at home within their culturescape. In this new series, Lalla has transcended cultural criticism and has entered a domain of intense subjectivity in which complaints dissolve into troubled tranquility—the end of an era of her life. (Michael Weinstein)
Lost in Translation: A Review of Crip* at Gallery 400 The strongest works in the exhibition succinctly express the ways the artist relates to their own body while calling out how the artist’s body and body of work has been perceived or coded against norms or ideals.
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