NGV Limited Edition - Deanna Hitti, M Is For Madraseh

Colour screenprint on cyanotype print
Approximately A2 in size

Hitti’s new work, M is for madraseh (school), 2022, is an extension of her installation A is for alam (pen), which was first exhibited as part of Handmade Universe at the State Library of Victoria in 2022. The series drew inspiration from histories of printing and publishing, presented as 156 double-sided floating pages that could be folded into books. Curator Linda Short describes the installation as a ‘challenge … [to] the history of the Western gaze’.

The work re-imagines over 100 images from French orientalist paintings made during the early period of colonialism. Hitti employs an historical method of reproduction, the cyanotype, to reclaim and reconfigure distorted depictions of Middle Eastern people, erasing and reprinting these archival images to transform their misrepresentations into ghostly presences. The work is then overlaid with a two-colour screenprint that teaches an Arabic-speaking child learning the English language how to write the Latin letter ‘m’, recalling textbooks that Hitti herself studied as preparation for starting school. The resulting work is a subtle commentary on how notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ are formed, practised and contrived through both image and text.

Deanna Hitti M is for madraseh (school) 2022–23; colour screenprint on cyanotype print; ed. 1/15.
Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2022
© Deanna Hitti

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