Gender and the Veil: Habiba Nowrose’s Performative Portraits

Habiba Nowrose is a photographer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Having completed her Masters in Gender Studies, she studied photography at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute and graduated in 2015.

Her practice uses portrait photography to produce a complex reflection on the representation of gender, identity and the feminine subject. In the bodies of work presented here, she utilises patterned fabrics extensively to simultaneously conceal her subjects’ faces while revealing and reveling in the performance of gender embodied in the photographs.

The two series Concealed and Life of Venus present meticulously crafted images that subtly blur the edges between the background and foreground—and between objects, men and women—with the use of similarly patterned fabric draped in various configurations. While the first series focuses on individual portraits, the second stages couples and moments from domestic life, enhancing the tensions around gender and identity in these works.

Nowrose employs a unique strategy of representation akin to the idea of “dazzle camouflage,” a kind of camouflage strategy on ships used extensively during the First World War. This attracted the attention of cubists, like Pablo Picasso, who were working with similar representational strategies in painting. The process—credited to British marine artist Norman Wilkinson—consists of creating complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colours. These are made to interrupt and intersect with each other in order to confuse the viewer with regard to the nature, position and speed of the painted objects. In Nowrose’s portraits, this strategy—of simultaneously dazzling the viewer with loud patterns and prints, while camouflaging their bodies—seems to point to ideas of gender performance and fluidity by displacing boundaries within the image.

All images by Habiba Nowrose.

Click on the image to view the album