The image of the female body is a fraught site for cultural politics. It is driven, if we are being honest, by varying degrees of sublimated desire. As the authority of the male gaze in a Western (Laura Mulvey) cinematic sense, becomes a playground for female voices, so too does the Greenbergian stranglehold over ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ forms of art. The female gaze in art is a No Man’s Land as ambiguous, uncertain, or undefined as the geography of a place between warring sides. For Mareli Lal this terrain of the female body in photography becomes a playground for her own deeply personal narrative shaped by the consumption of historical fashion photography, cinema and the particular flavour of globalisation in a South African context.  

 

What this current epoch affords artists like Lal is the freedom to make visual references in an interdisciplinary manner. Fashion photography, art history, film, advertising and social media can be cited in a free flow that mirrors the ways in which they are consumed. Charlotte Jansen muses in her 2017 publication Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze that the photographs women take of women appear to attempt to get at the unseen structures in our world. The structures that create pervading perceptions within media and aesthetics. While historically, female photographers have adopted no observational points of view to evoke the poignant, relatable and haunting, Lal prefers to engender images shaped by consumerism with a poignance of pose, form and colour.  

 

There is a fragmentation of the body in Lal’s images that draws the viewer into an emotional intimacy with her subject. It is as though, for Lal, the fragmented female body can be arranged like the formal elements in an Ikebana flower arrangement. William A Ewing notes in a 2000 publication, The Century of the Body that with the technological advancements of the early twentieth century camera, photographers settled upon the fragmentation of the body as a visual vocabulary of form. Viewing the body close-up or in part has become part of the lexicon of lens-based images as forms are cropped by the limitations of the viewfinder. The fragmented body becomes an intriguing puzzle piece to reading an image: a formalist, surrealist, realist or literal fragment (Ewing p20). In Lal’s photographs the female form is fragmented by clothing, props or set. Her model’s poses are athletic with limbs twisted in ways associated with yoga or gymnastics. Coupled with her images of bounded fabric forms on plinths, the female body appears subtly constrained, despite the formal signals of playful freedom employed in the choice of colour and nudity. 

 

Lal’s use of bright, saturated colour is symptomatic of both place and psyche. The post 1990s liberation moment in South Africa was a joyous but deeply troubling time for cultural identity. The lifting of a deeply colonial rule exposed a vulnerable cultural landscape, dazzled by the image imports from the West, but grappling to develop a unique cultural voice in a place prescribed by modernist influences and an obliteration of oral tradition. Colour is where Lal hints at fragile identities obscured by wigs and clothing. In a similar vein to the use of colour in popular films by Wes Andersen, Lal pairs sentiments of self-doubt, self-excuse or ‘good girl’ phrases with pastel hues and the body in uncomfortable poses in works like Nothing to do with Me or This is why we can’t have nice things. Self-conscious challenges in works like Who Cares About the Lyrics, This is Why I Have to Leave and Take it All, belie the lifting of that good girl mask. But in the same way that we question how seriously we must take the crimes and heartaches of Wes Andersen’s characters, so too in Lal’s works is sentiment also part of her realm of play in the same way as colour, form and composition. Throughout her images, Lal hints at a duality of performed joie de vivre and a broken inner psyche through colour and pose. Her collection of images pares the trappings of fashion – wigs, clothes and architecture – with nudity and more vulnerable domestic interiors: paring appearance and performance with emotional fatigue.  

 

Like other photographers from Africa (Lakin Ongunbanwo, Vivian Sassen, Athi Patra Ruga) Mareli Lal enjoys the freedom of photography as a medium vested in but independent of fashion. Fashion photography has become an art historical trove of image-making techniques. The work of the French photographer, Guy Bourdin from the 1960s first fused fashion photography with narrative, provocation and style, de-constructing the representation of glamour and establishing the idea of product as secondary to the role of the image. This was a mantel taken up by other artists like Ouka Leele who grew to prominence in the 1980s in Spain. Today, Lal’s photographic art sits comfortably in a contemporary zeitgeist of women photographers from around the world who use the colour, narrative and forms of fashion photography to tell personal stories: Isabelle Wenzel (Germany), Brooke Didenato (New York), Jess Bonham (London), Christa VD Niet (Netherlands) and Flora Borsi (Hungary). In contrast to the more visceral critique of consumerism by earlier women artists like Cindy Sherman or Barbara Kruger, this new wave of female image-makers are women who have emerged from a world already saturated with stock-image identities and product prescribed ideals of beauty. Their critique is not one from before the explosion of media but from a psyche built within an image-saturated world. Their response to contemporary consumerism is to seek a place of play within the gilded cage.  

 

And gilded that cage may be with the multitude of global influences currently at play. As curator Filippo Maggia notes in a forward to the exhibition Asian Dub Photography held in Modena in 2009, there is no reason for the West and the East to be considered separately anymore. Globalisation is a flowing system of references, contaminations, reciprocal attractions, conflicts, dominations, contrasts and references. ‘There are many Wests and many different Easts,’ he observes. And all is exchanged in ‘redundant, relentless, incessant ways’ like a harmonious clamour shaped by an ‘inexplicable equilibrium.’ I cite Ikebana as a reference for Lal’s arranged forms in full recognition of this infiltration of a Japanese practice within a globalised visual economy. Despite being a largely sealed off society, Japan remains a prominent exporter of sophisticated technologies and young fashion. The Ikebana reference seems appropriate in that Lal’s photographs are primarily about space and objects. The female form emerges as one of the elements at play in the staged manipulation of abstracted forms. There is a seductive simplicity in Lal’s abstracted compositions that merge the surrealist and realist body fragment with architecture, colour and texture.  

 

The emotional intimacy of the female body is a form that Lal carefully employs in a visioning of the ‘unseen structures’ of her world. In the overt structuring of her photographic staging, Lal hints at a conflicting narrative bound up with pervading perceptions within media and aesthetics. The era of the female gaze has done much to liberate young female photographers by creating viewers receptive to the challenges such a gaze invokes, but the logic of this gaze remains contained within a systemic globalisation. Mareli Lal treads in the territory of many international photographers but recognises this site of play as an ambiguous geography held by an ‘inexplicable equilibrium’ and seductive harmony amidst the clamour of globalised culture.