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Orientalism: Beauty, Power, and the Gaze That Took

🌍 In 19th-century Europe, Orientalism bloomed across canvases, literature, and design — depicting the “East” as exotic, sensual, and mysterious. But these weren’t portraits of real places. They were fantasies, filtered through empire.

🎨 Artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Ingres painted harems, veils, and desert scenes — lush with detail, but empty of context. These weren’t documentary — they were dominant. They turned culture into spectacle, and difference into decoration.

📚 Edward Said famously named it: Orientalism is how the West imagined the East to control it. It reduced complex, living societies into backdrops for European power, desire, and projection.

🧠 Today, Orientalism lives on — in fashion, film, and even museum labels. The work now is not to erase it, but to reframe it — to ask: Who painted this? For whom? And at what cost?

#OrientalismExplained #ArtAndEmpire #SeemaR

In this video, Seema R. explores how Orientalist art shaped what the West thought it knew about the East — and how reclaiming that gaze begins with re-seeing the image.

Follow Seema R. for more stories where beauty meets bias, and aesthetics meet accountability:
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#VisualPower #ColonialArt #ReframingTheGaze #SeemaR