Victoria Cattoni’s
engagement with ‘hijab’ (veil) may remind one of the blurring distinctions
between the sacred and the profane in today’s age of consumerist global
culture, media spectacle, viral as well as coercive marketing. Using her own experience in Malaysia and
Indonesia as a starting point, Victoria simulates a safe, secure and
non-confrontational environment for her audience to engage with ‘hijab’. In Victoria’s
highly inclusive and audience-centred work, multi-dimensional patterns of perception
determine multiple, if not contesting notions of hijab.
Through a highly
organic methodology and interactive workshops in several major cities in
Malaysia, Australia, and Singapore, Victoria indirectly hints on the sometimes
awkward relationship between the practice of wearing a ‘hijab’ with rapid urbanization,
popular mass cultures, advertising, branding, and propagation of consumerist
lifestyle. In fact, the whole idea of expanding consumerist agendas through
control of capital and market flow may have also been ‘unveiled’, so to speak. As
trans-national brand names influence one’s choice of a lifestyle, they are
sometimes subscribed, practiced and ritualized even more faithful than
traditional religions. Ironically, the practice of wearing certain brand names
in a certain secular posture may even be guarded more piously than wearing a
hijab. Hijab, through Victoria’s scheme, has become a site of ideological
contestation.
Where does one place
the act of wearing a hijab in the whole spectrum of fragmented contemporary urban
experience and hyper-view living? Where does hijab stand in a rapidly changing
pluralistic and multicultural urban society? Who and what defines cultural,
national, religious or spiritual identity in today’s age of ideological
contestation? Who represents who? Who creates meanings? Who creates contexts?
Who creates values? Who’s meanings, contexts and values should one uphold or
subscribe to?
In such a
contestation, lifestyle and identity as implied by the practice of wearing a
hijab can be spiritually-rooted as much as artificially constructed and hyped
to feed the sentiment of targeted mass and market. Interestingly, the work may also
reflect the notion that we are increasingly living in a permanently deconstructed,
and densely saturated image-oriented global society. It is a society in which
singularity of meaning is impossible to attain. For some, we are living in an
increasingly networked world where meanings are never static, but always in a
state of flux. What is the meaning of wearing hijab in todays age of cultural
fragmentation and loss of centrality?
Through her work,
Victoria further unveils the unstable semiotic interplay between a signifier (the
image of hijab in many versions and names) and signified (what it means). By
allowing her audience (Muslims and non-Muslims) to be active participants,
readers and producers of meanings, one may find oneself swimming in an ocean of
schizophrenic, multi-textual and contradictory readings of hijab. Through the
work, Victoria seems to teasingly suggest that meaning of the signifier (hijab
or its wearer or both) is simply a matter of its relationship to other
signifiers (perhaps, non-hijab wearing women or the so-called ‘secular’ dressing).
In the midst of media spectacle, hijab as a form of expressive language of
choice or image may have no natural connection at all to its actual, intrinsic and
spiritual meaning.
The result is a sense
of permanent deconstruction and deferred meaning, leaving one without any hint
of a clear or definitive reading. One may be drowned by a sea of endless
possibilities in reading and constructing the meaning of hijab. In her work, images
of different hijab-wearing women function as interwoven signifiers in a field
of deferred meanings; a multidimensional space in which a variety of hijab images,
readings and interpretations blend and clash. The burden is placed on the
viewers (or readers of images and interpretations) to engage with them and put
them to work. Interestingly, instead of unveiling or undressing the hijab,
Victoria is actually unveiling the viewers’ very own reading, interpretation, sentiment
and attitude towards hijab. In short, it is the audience members who are being
‘unveiled’, instead of the ‘veil’ or hijab and its usual wearer.
Victoria also seems
to suggest that meaning about hijab can be constructed (be it spiritually, or
secularly, through the mass media for example) as a system of thinking to a
point that the thought system be taken as natural, habitual or inevitable. For
some Muslims, it may appear culturally natural for adult Muslim women to wear
hijab, as much as for some non-Muslims, it may appear natural to assume that
hijab represents suppression of women’s freedom. Victoria’s inclusive strategy may
open a Pandora box of criticism, if not contempt towards the practice of
wearing hijab as much as it may also reveal negative stereotypical readings of
hijab as constructed by the mainstream Western mass-media (often taken
uncritically as natural by numbed Western media consumers).
In this case,
non-Muslims’ stereotypical negative readings of hijab may be exposed as mythologies
conjured by the mainstream Western media with the intention of demonizing
anything Islam. Islam (as well as Muslims and their codes of living or practice
including wearing a hijab) may thus be taken as a global threat that one has to
be wary of. Creating a fictional demon by the way, is a good way to attract as
much as to distract or divert attention. Controversy sells.
Victoria’s work also seems
to affirm the postmodernist’s notion that we live within the sway of mythology
conjured for us by the mass media, movies and advertisements. Not everyone can
agree with this though, especially those firmly rooted in the monolithic meta-narrative
of modernist ethos. Her work may also unveil that in the effort of making hijab
an inclusive subject of concern, a deeper and comprehensive concept of hijab
may be relegated to a mere object of an open field of discourse (if not contempt),
devoid of what can be claimed as values intrinsic to Islam. Complicated by the
imperatives of globalization, Victoria may further expound that the notion of wearing
hijab may continue to be mentally, economically and culturally imperialized by
the ebb and flow of free market capitalism and its impinging consumerist
agendas.
Victoria’s audience
may re-use, re-fuse, fuse and even confuse our habitual reading of hijab to
unveil possibilities of new readings. In some combinations of texts and images,
we may be jolted to confront our own preconceive readings of hijab. Such a work
may reveal the fact that we are living in a multidimensional world of overlapping
contexts. If we are lucky, these contexts may compliment each other to give us
a coherent reality. Often times, especially in today’s age of globalization and
information implosion, they may contradict, cancel, mock, satirize, and
deconstruct each other to eventually re-construct a new (if not absurd)
reality. Established contexts that were previously employed to stabilize our
fixed and given notion of political and cultural reality of hijab are
continuously being shackled and shifted, freely appropriated, interrupted,
broken, fragmented, or even crashed for good by Victoria’s audience-centred
strategy and inclusive method. In doing so, our own thought pattern and
emotional response towards hijab may be at stake. We are forced to forsake
grand narrative, singular and monolithic view of a fixed reading of hijab for a
more flexible, impermanent, multi-textual and multifaceted mental perceptions
on the notion of self, identity, culture, politics or even our present reality
at large.
Victoria’s work
further reiterates our fragmented postmodern stance and reaffirms an exploded
hyperview of multiple narratives that are defining our contemporary experience.
It reflects a society where images (and texts) have become sites of
contestation in which culture, lifestyle, identity and political consciousness
can be constructed, and deconstructed. The question perhaps is how adaptive we
are in engaging with such contestation?
Hasnul
J Saidon
May
2009
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