My 🌺🍪🌲, My 👉🏾🍝💦
[My Manousha, My Choice]
My Manousha, My Choice got developed during my time at BAR - Beirut Artist Residence in spring 2019. It is a triptych of multi-channel video installations about patriarchal structures in the Middle East and therefore the role of women within these. The three mixed-media collages consist out of snippets of moving and still images, found, as well as recorded video and audio footage, 3D scans, GIFs, animations and symbols lent from the internet and contemporary digital culture. Partly interactive (with game elements like navigating/controlling), the three pieces comment on different aspects of the Lebanese society nowadays: the first and name-giving one ‘My Manousha, My Choice’ reflects on the sexual and abortion rights of women in Lebanon today. Even though the country is widely seen as the most Western and liberal one in the region, the legal rights of women are hair-raising: abortion is strictly forbidden (until very recent even after rape the woman could or should, if she was lucky, marry her raper in order to be less disgraced through an illegitimate baby). These laws seem fallen of our time and enrooted in the patriarchal culture of the region. At the same time Lebanon is a capitalist country taking part in Western hyper-consumerism and sexualized imagry for profit increase. In this first video installation different women merge into each other with a Manousha - the traditional Lebanese flat bread - instead, or on top of their pregnant belly. Lebanon is all about food, and the iconic Manousha a great metaphor for Lebanese culture. The title ‘My Manousha, My Choice’ refers to the popular slogan ‘My body, My choice’. The images of the pregnant women I all found online and edited them however I wanted. I use the visual material just as I found it on Google Image search: pixelated and with crossing logos (of photo selling platforms). This I do in order to show the contrast of how much the public has through the internet access to the female body, while in the analog world - offline - women are not even allowed to decide by themselves over those bodies - whether they get a baby or not.
It is a digital project by a female tech-artist and multimedia activist about women's rights in Lebanon and the region, as well as the discrepancy of digital exploitation of the female body at the same time. With the use of mixed technologies it reflects on the juristic situation of females and how restricted are their rights (no right for abortion, being legally 'belonging' first of the father, later the husband, etc). At the same time also in Lebanon women get objectified and exploited - on and offline. This contrast of how much 'the public' has through the internet access to the female body, while in the analog world - offline - women are not even allowed to decide by themselves over their bodies - whether they get their babies or not.