Not Given: Talking of and Around Images of Arab Women April 25, 2007

Based on the collection of photographs housed at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, 'Not Given,' guest curated by Dore Bowen and Isabelle Massu, challenges the photograph's privileged status by interrogating its discursive context, exploring the skin of words that surround photographs of "Arab women" in a bold attempt to shatter the reductive label that has been assigned to them. The photographs in this collection, exhibited as large-scale projected images in digital format and accompanied with an audio component featuring voices of Arab and Arab-American women, are stunning in their diversity, often calling into question preconceived notions of Middle Eastern photography.