Queen Elizabeth II is fond of it. Egyptian pharaohs wore it and called it Nemes. It’s just a piece of cloth and yet so important in any possible way for many people, pulling on both sides of it, trying to pull it on or off, wrap it up or on.

I myself felt the pulling when travelling in India and simply not feeling comfortable by being stared at all the time. I bought a thin veil. And – yep: modestified my shoulders and neck, sometimes my head. Unwillingly. but feeling better than before, when stared at and eaten by eyes. I live in Germany, a most tolerant society these days, where I am free to do and express what I want. Free to live the way I want. Where starers and touchers are told to stop and leave me alone rather than I am told to hide and tuck away ideally myself entirely. Each and everyone in my country can choose their own life style. Their own way of dressing herself or himself, their own way of privacy or public exposure. I feel strange when I see people who make different choices than I do. Defining myself as ‘norma’, perhaps what most people would do, makes all things severely different being slightly off. Embarassing to admit, but: Yes, I do find myself staring at women my age in high-heeled over knee boots, dressed much lighter than myself – and I find myself staring at women my age covered thoroughly.

And: I am very happy I live in a place, where I can lean back and stare at both worlds. Where people can live and make their own life choices.

German photographer Seren Basogul took a deeper look in to why and how looking at covered women leaves us behind in confusion in her graduation work in 2010. It’s worth looking at the metamorphosis of the strawberry blonde women she portrayed.

Really interesting as well yo click yourself through images, associated with ‘headscarf’ in the different language versions of Wikipedia. Some countries describe it more as a workplace safety cloth, to protect your hair from getting dirty of prevent hair falling in a clean environment, others draw instant references to religions, where Mary is almost always portrayed with headscarf, nuns, Muslim and some orthodox Jewish women wear it. The language tabs on Wikipedia are on the left side…go click! It’s an interesting journey through the writers minds.

Egyptian Blogger and art student Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, who draw a lot of attention earlier this year with her series of Nude Art, started a veil project, portraying women before and after wearing the hijab. Wanna be part of it? This is how it works:

Women who were veiled and took off the veil and women who are veiled and want to take off the veil,
Send me all or some of these items on aliaaa.elmahdy@hotmail.com if you agree to publish them:

1. Full or first name
2. Two photos one with hegab and one with no hegab
3. Why you wear/wore hegab
4. Why you took off hegab
5. What were the responses when you took off hegab
6. Why you want to take off hegab
7. Why you didn’t take off hegab in spite of your desire to take it off
8. What were the responses when you said you want to take off hegab
9. The age when you started wearing hegab

Für Deutsche, die teilhaben möchten:

Frauen, die verschleiert waren und den Schleier abgelegt haben und Frauen, die verschleiert sind und den Schleier ablegen möchten, sendet Folgendes an aliaaa.elmahdy@hotmail.com, wenn Ihr einverstanden seid, es zu veröffentlichen:

(Google Translate sagt mir, dass das Arabische Original von “Mädchen” statt “Frauen” spricht, jedoch “Sie” verwendet… da Aliaa Elmahdy den Englischen Text ebenfalls selbst veröffentlicht hat, bitte ich die des Arabischen kundigen Leser des Originals zu entschuldigen und sich mit der Übersetzung des Englischen Textes zu begnügen.)

1. Voller Name oder Vorname
2. Zwei Fotos, eines mit, eines ohne Hijab
3. Warum Du den Hijab trägst / trugst
4. Warum Du den Hijab ablegtest
5. Was die Reaktionen waren, als Du den Hijab ablegtest
6. Warum Du den Hijab ablegen willst
7. Warum Du den Hijab nicht ablegtest, obwohl du den Wunsch hast dies zu tun
8. Was die Reaktionen waren, als Du sagtest, Du willst den Hijab ablegen
9. Dein Alter, als Du anfingst, Hijab zu tragen

Yesterday Munich University of Film and Television – HFF München – held it’s Open House. I’ve been representing cinematography graduates in the panel talk about networking. The very same evening, an old friend mailed me this amazing film industry career guide from filmsourcing.com: “Filmmakers sharing resources” – well…I definitely love their flow chart…

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, an Egyptian art student and blogger, published a few days back nude images of herself along with a brief note:

Put on trial the artists’ models who posed nude for art schools until the early 70s, hide the art books and destroy the nude statues of antiquity, then undress and stand before a mirror and burn your bodies that you despise to forever rid yourselves of your sexual hangups before you direct your humiliation and chauvinism and dare
to try to deny me my freedom of expression

The three images of herself with a yellow censorship bar on her eyes, mouth and vagina made the headlines all over the world. I saw them in a German newspaper. Trying to find out more about this brave person I looked around on the web. I did expect the humiliations,  death and rape threats I encountered. In shock and disbelief left me the fact, that most western news pages only published Aliaa Magda Elmahdy’s work pixellated. Pixellated nipples, pixellated breasts, pixellated crotch. Journalists out there: you report from free countries in wich freedom of expression and speech is guaranteed to you by your constitution! What are you scared of? What do you fear? – And why do you not publish any of the other nude images Aliaa Magda Elmahdy has collected in this blog post? Naked males and females, nude drawings and photography. Would you publish a pixellated L’Origine du Monde and insult Gustave Courbet?

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy has stared a veil campaign. You can find it here.
She runs several blogs, mostly bilingual Arabic/English. Find all links to her blogs collected here.
If you came for the famous post with naked males and females, go here and to follow her on Twitter go here.
Should you want to support the cause, check here. Dutch and Israeli women as well as Hamburg based Iranian writer Ziba Nawak showed their support already. We’re still waiting for nude men to join, solidarize, take their clothes of, take a snap and  fly their flags of nudity.

In the last weeks, I came across all these people I mentioned in the beginning. I read their book, saw their images, watched their movies, listened to their words in the run of only a few days. Meet Carolin Emcke here, support medica mondiale founded by Monika Hauser, watch  Joris Ivens films Regen or The Spanish Earth on youtube, flip through Paolo Pellegrin’s work.  (Or go see his latest exhibition free of charge here – should you be in Munich that is…my friend Enrico Strathausen made me go and I am so glad I came!)

Oh, yes and: Hemingway…when have you been last at your local public library? Go, read!

Last not least: No, I do not have the rights. But the Musée d’Orsay is absolutely worth the trip, the time and the money. It’s been a while the Musée d’Orsay and I last met. Go there. No  prints can show you what they do.

Buried, one of the works, very fast makes you think you visit a crime scene. Each thread on a branch, each dash of color, each moss-covered stone seems to be proof for what your own mind is playing on you. And you feel you are there.

Willie Doherty was the artist, whose work I learned to love there, in Edinburgh. You best check the list here or here for a collection near you, who holds his work. – The presentation, the atmosphere in a dark room, the quality is not comparable to the Net, when you really want to experience what I experienced there and feel something.

Willie Doherty has been nominated twice for the Turner Price. But he is not coming any close to the cliché you might have of what a Turner Prize nominee might look like. Doherty is coming across like the guy next door. And still, what he’s got to say is far from boring. Read a great interview here for the Journal of Contemporary Art.

Two interviews to watch are right here:

– Willie Doherty profile for the Channel4 ideas factory website
– Willie Doherty at The Fruitmarket Gallery

Why I remember all this now, in rainy Munich January? I got some sunlight sent from the blue hour. A blog I can only recommend subscribing to. Each day, sometimes only weekly, some strange puff of sweetness and light floods on to my work desk with Brian Ferry’s photographs.

the blue hour showed me these days forests, I remembered from Willie Doherty’s work. Same trees, different light. Sunny and luminous, but still as weird and wonderful as Doherty’s landscapes.

All stamps via Yellow Owl Workshop. Brown strong parcel wrapping paper via amazon. Green and red stamp ink via Pelikan. Red ribbons: vintage home collection. Embroidery: vintage flea market find.

Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote earlier this month:

Approximately 100 people are executed by American authorities every year. But in the past few months, supplies of the drug have become scarce.
The only manufacturer based in the US, Hospira, is unwilling to continue to make its product available for lethal injections, and under American law it is not allowed to simply change the injection “recipe.” To do that, a complicated approval procedure is required. So authorities — who have been postponing executions as a result of the difficulty in finding supplies — have been seeking other sources such as those in the EU.

The walls are thin, above the windowsill huge gaps are looming, standing up roaring each night with the winter storms. Water flows in here and there, ice is its witness in the morning. It makes you understand, how hard your ancestors might have been fighting each year to pull the kids healthily through the winter until spring dawned and the days got longer and warmer again.

Our winters, however, even though spent in an old house with no proper heating, are wonderful:
We order wood via the phone from the local farmer, who’s not yet on the Internet. It comes to the door step. We don’t even have to chop it, our wood. We easily burn down one 100-year-old tree in a week, when everybody is at home. The wood looks white and innocent, when it is sitting there. I can see, that rough bark is actually only a very, very thin layer. A tree is a pretty remarkable creature. Sometimes, I wonder what might be if entire Europe would go back to wood-firing.

Oh, here are blankets in England.

We took a Saturday off to bake with friends a lovely day and night long. And we made a wreath for Advent from the rosehips in our garden. When the snow’s coming, I’ll put them outside again for the birds.

The stations in the morning are filled with folks running somewhere: Last night owls scamper home, office workers hurry to their warm wooden desks, commuters huddle up in the corner to go down, go up, pass by some stairs to change trains. – Occasionally kissing couples block the way, saying endlessly good-bye, their faces pampered by the dawning days light.
Fog hangs heavy above the tracks. Red signal lights shine through the smokey air. Mist is creeping inside your woolen coat just as you, slandering along the train, found your compartment.

A ridiculously excited man with a funny German accent wishes you a pleasant journey.
No emergency procedure explanation given by young ladies in silly uniforms.
The train starts moving. Its rattling shakes me slowly in a deep, soothing sleep.