Electronic Veils Series
Eiman Elgibreen. Excuse Me Miss, Are You Lost? (Electronic Veils Series). collage, wood, and Plexiglas. w.50 x h.60 cm. 2018.
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Eiman Elgibreen. So She Is The Open-Minded And You Are..? (Electronic Veils Series). collage, wood, and Plexiglas. w.50 x h.60 cm. 2018.
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Eiman Elgibreen. I am Just Like You, I Thought.. (Electronic Veils Series). collage, wood, and Plexiglas. w.50 x h.60 cm. 2018.
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Eiman Elgibreen. I Thought You Were a Big Irish Guy! (Electronic Veils Series). collage, wood, and Plexiglas. w.50 x h.60 cm. 2018.
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The Main Concept
Electronic Veils is a series of 5 paintings that attracts our attention to the deceiving nature of human relations nowadays as a result of telecommunication technology and the invention of the email. It encourages the audience to carefully think about what defines a person's identity? Is it his face or his personality?
The series was born as a response to the audience who commented by saying "yes" on a previous work by the artist called "Does a Face Make a Difference?", which addresses the conflicted representation of the traditional face mask between Western and Eastern cultures. Their answer was prompted by a belief that seeing one's face is important in business to develop trust, which discard the fact that many deals are done today through telecommunication with people we have never met before. This idea tempted the artist to play with the idea of cultural transformation and hybridity by looking at emails as a new form of the traditional face veils and seeing this as an evolution of this veil.
The series shows several emails exchanged between the artist and other people whom she has worked with through emails only since 2008. Each email is printed on a transparent surface to symbolise the assumed clarity of the artist's identity by the other person, while underneath is a hazy photograph of the artist printed on a wooden panel. However, there is a twist in the title of each painting as it reveals the person's first comment when they met the artist later. These all capture their sense of fear when they faced a different image from what they had in their mind about the artist before meeting her; which excites the artist even more to think about the reasons for this fear although we still know that the person still has the same personality.