In the manner of a skilfully-crafted, three-part documentary, Majida Khattari tackles head-on three complementary aspects of marriage in Morocco, her native country. Questioning (by using) and deconstructing the stereotype of the veiled woman, she strives to analyse an issue that has become even more topical since the work was made in 2001.
Rêve de jeunes filles may be interpreted as a reflection on how to define the reality of a religious culture based on ancestral traditions which gives rise to so much controversial and nebulous rhetoric. Opting for a simple form of expression, the artist has produced this visual work in the form of a sociological study, which poses the broad question of the woman's condition within the Muslim culture. With her line of fashion garments (from the veil to the burka) Majida Khattari goes beyond making a powerful critique of how Muslim women are still alienated from the 21st century, and stresses how Western perception of the Arab world is in fact erroneous. The image of the television in one of the first scenes of Rêve de jeunes filles is thus deliberately delusive. The television, as a focal point of the home and a source of information, is decorated with embroidery and crochetwork, trinkets and artificial flowers. Normally the symbol of an opening towards the outside world, here the television presents a young girl, who, instead of evoking her dream, quietly recites in a voice full of a cold, the rituals and social traditions of marriage as declared by the Persian philosopher, al-Ghazali, a great 12th-century advocate of moderate Islam. Each of the women presented in the three sequences are treated with great respect. The first is embroidering. She has never married, lives with her mother, yet still dreams of marital union. The marriage ceremony filmed in the second video presents the celebration from a masculine point of view. Majida Khattari, who designed the costumes, focuses her attention on the men: all wearing veils over their heads, they dance around the bridegroom, who is himself dressed in an attire worthy of a prince from The Arabian Nights. They all look like transvestites. This shift from one genre to the next also allows the artist to evoke the constraints of marriage in a traditional society where subjection to social laws often goes beyond sexual identity. The third video is the story of a young Moroccan woman of French nationality who admits to her fantasy of possessing a harem of men. In reversing this cliché, Majida Khattari is proposing another: that of marriage to the harem in which the body is able to express itself when not restrained by dogma.

Elvan Zabunyan
Translated by Diana Tamlyn