Majida Khattari studied at the Schools of Fine Arts first in Casablanca, then in Paris, where she moved in 1990. After her debut in photography – black and white portraits veiled in muslin – she chose to tackle the heated debate over the question of headscarves in public schools, prevalent in France since 1989, and has turned her reflection towards the representations of the body of Muslim women, caught between Western fantasies, on the one hand, and contemporary Islamic tradition, on the other. In her performance fashion show, she combines song, music and dance with tragicomic designs of sculptural dresses inspired by burkas, niqabs, hijabs, and safseris. She criticizes the body and clothing standards imposed on Muslim women. Her designs sometimes hide the face and can feel heavy and oppressive, while at other times tackles the issue of white weddings, presenting a woman whose dress is covered of residence permit in La mariée de l’Église Saint-Bernard. The first of these performance fashion shows was held in Paris in 1996 and ended with her “Chador of the Republic”, a clownish gown that hindered the body’s movement and was coloured like the French flag. In her July 2001 show at the Centre Pompidou, M. Khattari depicted the oppression endured by Afghan women.

Her series Les Mille et Une Souffrances du tchadiri shows the Afghan veil preventing models from stand up straight. Broadly speaking, M. Khattari’s gowns are to be understood as a feminist critique of the many diktats – particularly in the world of fashion – imposed on women’s bodies. While she excoriates fundamentalism, she also highlights stereotyped misconceptions about Islam within French society and exposes the ambiguous situation that women of Arab descent living in the country have to endure, between religious codes and secular injunctions in her work Voile islamique Parisien (presented at the Monnaie de Paris and the cité internationale).

Her video installation Rêve de jeunes filles (2001) is a humorous take on the myth of the Moroccan marriage. An unmarried embroiderer living with her mother argues for the respect of traditional values, while a young Frenchwoman of Moroccan descent hesitates between a fantasised Oriental wedding and the pleasures of a harem of boys. On a third screen, an Oriental-style homosexual wedding is celebrated. More recently, M. Khattari revisits clichés surrounding orientalism through photography and painting. The artist modernises orientalist characters, by reconstituting settings inspired by famous compositions, endowing them with an uncertain status that is part fantasy, part photographic reality.

Majida Khattari’s works combine aesthetic pleasure with symbolic considerations and offer a double reading, in which the female body – whether covered, suggested or masked – seems to melt into the settings that surround it. The viewers are then propelled into this emotional duality as they look at the female body: first as admirers of the voluptuousness of the representation, then as voyeurs participating in its objectification.

Her work has been shown at the Musée national des beaux-arts in Québec, at the Essor Gallery in London, at the Delacroix Museum in Paris, and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.