The Artist’s Guide to Re-Orienting the Orient
Nada Alsaikhan
This thesis reframes Orientalism as an ongoing visual and narrative system—not a relic of the past but a mechanism still shaping how the Middle East is seen, misunderstood, and controlled.
To unpack this, I use three familiar genres—Conspiracy Theory, Crime Noir, and Dystopia—because they mirror how the West already narrates the East: as secretive, criminal, and broken. These genres let me smuggle critique into the same frameworks used to justify war, theft, and surveillance. Through fictional storytelling layered with real-world case studies, I expose how erasure, spectacle, and control operate under the guise of objectivity.
The work is presented as a hand-crafted book that resists Western legibility—stitched with fabric, layered with texture, and written right to left—to echo the very complexity Orientalism tries to flatten. It is both artifact and argument: a reclamation of narrative, authorship, and aesthetic agency.
The Artist’s Guide to Re-Orienting the Orient
“From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.” - Edward Said. Orientalism. 1979 The Artist’s Guide to Re-Orienting the Orient is a genre-bending fantasy object—part thesis, part spellbook, part evidence locker. Through the visual languages of Conspiracy, Noir, and Dystopia, it interrogates how the Orient has been staged, stolen, distorted, and glamorized in Western imagination. The book is handcrafted as a decadent fantasy book: layered with fabric, lace, tassels, beads, and metallic thread. Pages shimmer with contradictions—beauty and violence, myth and memory—reclaiming the right to self-represent through aesthetic dissonance. This is not a restoration. It is a re-orientation.
Notes on Printing: Orientalism in Book Form
I created my book with my hands—layer by layer, stitch by stitch. It wasn’t just a book; it was an experience. It was meant to be felt as much as read. Fabric edges, tassels swaying, gems catching the light, pages unfolding from right to left, the weight of it resting in your palms like something ancient and alive. It was designed to resist flatness, to push back against the kind of cold, mechanical reproduction that has always plagued the way the East has been seen. It was a reclamation of beauty, of chaos, of depth. But when I sent it to print, it was reversed, stripped of its direction, and bordered in white as if the content needed containment. The images dulled, the weight wrong, the spirit gone. This second version of my book was never meant to exist—but it does, and that’s precisely the point. It became a perfect case study of how Orientalism operates—not just in content but in process. The East is always being reformatted, corrected, and repackaged for legibility. This printed copy is not just a mistake—it’s a metaphor. A version of my work that proves my argument simply by existing.Time Moves On, Yet the Places Remain
This project pairs Orientalist paintings and photographs of Middle Eastern sites with contemporary images of the same locations, layered through time. Using animation and printed transparencies, the series reveals how landscapes persist even as the narratives around them shift. Each work erases and reintroduces human figures through vellum overlays or looping GIFs, emphasizing absence, presence, and reinterpretation. The result is a haunting interplay between past representation and present reality—inviting viewers to question who frames history, and what remains when the frame changes.
