Phase 4: Weeks 19-24
Define, Test and Prepare
More Iteration and review
More further development, peer review, Studio Practice PDF
Weekly objectives
Room concepts: visuals and sounds
Event Literature
Industry feedback
Studio Practice PDF
Design Development
Morality Police
This room tells the story of how women’s cycling in Iraq is a problem to the authorities. Women are prepared to risk their own safety to cycle freely.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared a new religious law, a fatwa, forbidding women from cycling and claiming that; “Riding [a] bicycle often attracts the attention of men and exposes the society to corruption, and thus contravenes women’s chastity, and it must be abandoned.”
22nd April 2016
“Iran has deployed thousands of undercover agents to enforce rules on dress has cast the spotlight on an institution that is a major feature of daily life in several Muslim-majority countries.
“Police forces tasked with implementing strict state interpretations of Islamic morality exist in several other states, including Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Malaysia.”
This room uses the hijab as its main component. The hijab, the head covering worm by Iraqi women, is often the reason cited as the reason for the reaction towards women cycling because it is often worn incorrectly, or not at all when cycling.
Use the hijab as an obstacle to get into the room?
(I’ll visualise the rest without the thick walls so we can see what’s going on…)
The entrance to the room is through rows and rows of hijabs hanging from the ceiling just below head height for the visitor so that they have to push them aside to enter.
The hijabs are printed with the rules of the fatwa, quotes from the supreme leader and the Morality Police as well as reported abusive language aimed at the women cyclists by people in the street and their responses.
The typeface changed after this visual, wanted one that also had a stencil option so it would fit in with the DIY signs/interactive print idea for the overall exhibition identity. The new face is AType Stencil by Matt Willey.
How does the room develop?
What should be in the room when you get through the hijabs? Who are the key people? Reporters, activists?
Bike sculpture
Represent a bike (or just a giant bike, can’t decide yet), use the same style sculpture adapted for the other rooms (can’t decide yet…).
Based on real geometry – don’t just make it up!
Sculpture simplified to the minimum components, made some components incorrect so they would fit better aesthetically rather than being technically accurate. Too many components would over-complicate the structure.
Fabric photoshopped – above my 3D skill levels to render the fabric…
Read options…
Should the sizes be consistent or set the text to fill the space available?
Too many variations are overwhelming or confusing. Changes in type size would also give some statements priority over others, they need to stay the same to appear matter-of-fact and equal in intention.
Inside Walls
Bare concrete surfaces to add an austere atmosphere, along with heat and traffic noise. Left wall – LED screens to show portraits and details of the subjects. Right wall – a collection of portraits of the women with/without their hijab to show any difference in body language, do they seem as comfortable in their hijab as they do without or do they seem the same?
Portraits can be added to the scrapbooks along with smaller printed strips from the hijab wall.
Happy Accident!
Overlaying the images to create the storyboards showed an alternative to the bare walls which I think brings a more meaningful impact – where the hijabs hanging down are all kept to the same type sizes the different layers at different sizes which came about have a good representation of a shouting crowd of people.
I think this works inside the room rather than the entrance because visitors have the space to see them in full whereas the hijabs on the way into the room have less space around them obscuring the larger top-to-bottom or sideways printed statements.
Include the floor?
Barbara Kruger-style?
Reflection
This room was the turning point in the whole project, I think. All I had at the start was the idea of hanging hijab fabrics but nowhere to put them. I couldn’t get a link to cycling other than showing images and social media posts of what was happening to the women cyclists, but the dates shown on those posts was starting me to think that this maybe wasn’t as big a problem as it appeared anymore. But, feedback since from Marina Jaber, contacted in week 18 has removed the doubt. Although living in Iraq which is much less strict than Iran, has better knowledge of the situation there.
Also, just showing those images as proof was literal and I needed to imply the problem. The idea of the covered sculpture turned things back around to be more concept led rather than literal. It gives people something to think about and draw their own conclusions from rather than just say ‘look at what’s happening’.
Happy with the progress, especially the overall ID of the exhibition as it was the only part I hadn’t got a basic idea to use as a starting point. The upset has been the Kindermoord room/s. That’s the one I thought I had figured out at the start but it’s a bit of a let-down on the visuals for this week (I’ll show them next week).
Maybe there needs to be more going on, there’s not really any interaction being shown like there is in the Bike Bloc and Morality rooms – maybe it’s just that the visuals aren’t as striking or maybe the idea needs to shift.
Should the look be darker and more chaotic?
Regroup
New list
Work through
