Overview

"She's been referred to as the ""Sufi Frida Kahlo."" Maïmouna Guerresi is a photographer, whose work sometimes incorporates sculpture, video, and installation art. Her unique style combines Afro-Asian themes and symbolism with the traditions of Western classical iconography. This unique mélange incorporates cultural and religious influences, and fusion of different artistic languages. Her meticulously composed and highly impactful photographs include veiled figures that symbolise the body as a sacred building, as the ""temple of the soul,"" a modernist style reminiscent of some traditional Madonnas of classical art. The costumes are made of fabrics that she has collected in travels in Africa or Asia. The book is composed of ten chapters, ranging from ""Light Signs: Frontiers Between the Known and Unknown"" to ""The Giants: Dark Faces of the Great Spirit Guides"" through photographs that are totally distinctive in terms of creating environments that are fantastic and ethereal and unlike the work of any other photographer working today."

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9780990380887

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Reviews

The mysticism of Sufism suffuses her work, which is also influenced by the corporeal experimentation of the Body Art movement. The feeling the photographs convey is simultaneously disconcerting and serene. They are portraits that capture not individual personalities but the conjunction of the individual with something greater.--Andrea Denhoed The New York, September 18, 2015

It's hard to believe that Italian photographer Maimouna Guerresi doesn't use Photoshop for her dreamlike, spirituality-infused portraits many of her subjects levitate and have superhuman limbs. Guerresi was raised Catholic in Italy, but converted to Islam after a trip to Senegal in 1991. Over the next 15 years, she began taking photos rich with symbolism from Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Rather than one religion in particular, it's Guerresi's reverence of the human body that unifies her portraits, which were published in her first book of photography just this week.--Stephanie Eckardt New York Magazine, October 18, 2015

The cumulative effect of Guerresi s photographs is a blurring of the boundaries between what the real and the fantastical. In her work we perceive a sense of being that extends beyond the limitations of the physical form, a place we visit when we dream and assume a new way of perceiving the Oneness of the world. Inner Constellations charts the path we all share, an internal landscape, a space that exists between the sacred and the profane, the passage between light and dark, between life and death. It is the mystery we carry within us every day we are on this earth.--Miss Rosen Crave Online, October 29, 2015

Author Information

Patrizia Maimouna Guerresi is an Italian born multimedia artist working with photography, sculpture, video and installation. Graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, Maimouna turned to photography after a period of experimentation with painting and drawing. Early in her career she was invited to show in the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1982 and 1986), the Rome Quadrennial (1986), as well as at Documenta K18 (1987) in Kassel, Germany. Over the last two decades, her art has focused on empowering women and exhibiting a context of universal human values and conditions that is situated beyond psychological, cultural, and political borders. Her large scale images offer a unique perspective on the relationship between women and society, with particular reference to places where women are most marginalised, especially focusing on North African and South Asian countries. Maimouna has been extensively exhibited in solo and curated shows all over Europe, America and now India, and the Middle East. These include a 1999 solo show at the Foundation Mudima in Milan, where she made a large exhibition with video installations and photographs at a time when Islam was an emerging area of discursive interest; a 2009 solo exhibition at the National Museum of Bamako in Mali during the Biennial of African Art in Bamako, her first show in Africa; a group show with artists from the Middle West and Africa at the Stux, New York, in 2010; a solo show in Fez, Morocco, 2011; group shows in 2011 at the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, Belgium and the KIASMA Museum in Helsinki, Finland; and her shows in India and Bangladesh. She was also invited to participate once again, in the 54th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2011. She lives between Verona, Milan, and Dakar.

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