Seeing Otherwise, The Eye as an Icon in the Art of Baya Mahieddine and Alymamah Rashed

The eye occupies a privileged position within visual and symbolic systems across cultures, functioning simultaneously as organ and icon. Its associated meanings have long exceeded anatomical function, encompassing divine omniscience, epistemic authority, and inner consciousness. Across faith-based traditions, social, political and visual cultures - from the all-seeing Eye of Horus[1] to the celestial eye in Christian cosmologies[2] - the motif has mediated spiritual power, moral surveillance, and metaphysical insight, operating as a conduit between outer perception and inner vision.[3][4] In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the eye carries additional layers of meaning. While interpretations vary across contexts, it is most widely recognised as an apotropaic sign against the ʿayn al-ḥasūd (evil eye) and appears in both sacred and secular registers; in talismanic amulets, architectural ornament, textiles, and domestic objects.[5] These uses, rooted in local histories and devotional practices, entwine belief with cultural custom signalling the desire to protect, invoke spiritual clarity, or affirm mystical connection.[6]

In modern and contemporary art, the eye retains such associations but also becomes a site of rupture and instability. Surrealist painters, for example, reimagined it as a metaphor for psychic dislocation, eroticism, and the unconscious. In Magritte’s The False Mirror (1929), the vast iris filled with sky collapses the distinction between seer and seen, reflecting a preoccupation with perception, dream, and the metaphysical.[7] More recently, artists such as Shirin Neshat have taken the eye as a surface for inscribing text, as in her Women of Allah series (1993–97), where Persian script encircles or fills the iris. Here, the eye acts as a literal and figurative site of resistance, merging intimate selfhood with political and poetic expression. In this lineage, the eye - traversing religious, political, and aesthetic domains - functions as a device through which artists interrogate power and the gaze, evoke the divine, and forge cultural connections. It is within this symbolic continuum that the work of Baya Mahieddine and Alymamah Rashed can be read, each mobilising the eye as a generative icon in radically distinct yet interconnected ways.

Baya Mahieddine, Life, Practice, and the Iconography of the Eye
Baya Mahieddine (1931–1998), born Fatma Haddad in Bordj el-Kiffan, Algeria, occupies a singular position in twentieth-century art history, resisting easy categorisation within either Western modernism or Maghrebi tradition. Orphaned young, she was raised by her grandmother in Kabylia before being adopted at twelve by French intellectual Marguerite Camina Benhoura, who exposed her to European art while ensuring she retained her Algerian language, customs, and religious practice.[8] This formative period, marked by dislocation, cross-cultural encounters, and female mentorship, gave rise to a visual language, unmistakably her own.

Operating in the mid-20th century during a period when Algeria remained under French colonial rule, European critics variously labelled Baya as “naïve,” “primitive,” or a Surrealist, but she rejected such framings, claiming instead an artistic autonomy she referred to as “Baya-ism” (Grey Art Gallery, 2017). Working mainly in gouache, she established fantastical worlds inhabited solely by women and enlivened by organic and ornamental forms - lush patterns, flora, fauna, musical motifs, and vivid Mediterranean hues. These enclosed-yet-expansive compositions, unbound by linear perspective, often merge figure and environment so that garments might dissolve into floral or zoological elements.[9]

Although her dreamlike imagery has been connected to Surrealism, the thematic core of her work lies in reimagining women’s spaces. Curator and critic Natasha Boas describes her “closed-off, idyllic female worlds” as teeming with sensory detail: urns, blossoms, birdsong, and, later in her life, Qur’anic inscriptions nestled in garden settings (Boas in Grey Art Gallery, 2017: 20). Focusing more narrowly on the motif of the eye, Algerian feminist filmmaker and writer, Assia Djebar, describes the presence of a “giant eye” that hungers for colour, sound, and touch (Djebar in Grey Art Gallery, 2017: 30). This eye appears in varied forms - single profiles, frontal doubles, or hybridised with butterflies, flowers, and fish. In Femme Aux Yeux en Papillons (Woman With Butterfly Eyes) (1947), for instance, the subject’s eyes dissolve into winged forms, collapsing vision into gendered flight and metamorphosis. This coupling of sight and mobility situates the eye as an opening to an imaginative reconstitution of reality, in this case for the central female figure.

The Eye as Feminist Cartography
In Baya’s paintings, the eye functions as a feminist cartographic tool, mapping spaces of female autonomy. Unbound by perspectival logic, it moves through joyous, grounded habitats attuned to pleasure, creating worlds where vision is reciprocal rather than possessive. Early French and Maghrebi critics, noting her recurring single eye - often resembling the inverted Arabic letter ḥā’ - associated it with the Horus or hamsa eye, a familiar protective charm.[10]  Yet in Baya’s hands, the motif exceeds its apotropaic associations: it acts as a personal sign that unsettles Western framings, Islamic figural proscriptions, and cultural prescriptions alike.[11] In Femme Robe Bleue Cheveux Rouges (Woman With Red hair in a Blue Dress) (1947), the thickly black-lined eye thrusts through the patterned dress of a veil-free figure whose flowing, fiery-red hair radiates free movement. In Djebar’s terms, these are “liberated eyes” that look outward from women-centred worlds, reclaiming the right to see and be seen.[12] Here, the gaze becomes active and self-determined, embedding itself within a visual cartography that is protective, imaginative, and defiantly public - a refusal of invisibility under both patriarchal and colonial authority.[13]

Alymamah Rashed, The Eye as Portal and Play
If Baya’s eye anchors a closed, dreamlike female world, Alymamah Rashed’s ocular motif is centrifugal, an opening outward, pulling the viewer into mutable cosmologies where body, spirit, and habitat converge.[14]Working in the 21st-century Gulf, Rashed occupies a markedly different socio-political and cultural terrain than Baya. Her practice emerges from Kuwait, a state shaped by rapid modernisation, post-oil prosperity, and the attendant tensions between tradition and globalisation. Her paintings, often executed in translucent layers of watercolour or fluid oil, negotiate a selfhood informed by spiritual enquiry, philosophical reflection, and an ongoing dialogue with nature as well as the historical and cultural landscape of her native Kuwait. Like Baya, she weaves ornamentation, flora, and hybridised bodies into densely symbolic spaces; unlike Baya, her figures are intentionally unmoored from gender or fixed identity, existing instead as universal vessels in a state of perpetual becoming.

Rashed openly acknowledges Baya’s influence, citing her sensitivity to ornamentation, her centring of women, and her merging of cultural signifiers as formative.[15] For Rashed, Baya’s integration of Algerian and French textile patterns serves as a metaphor for layered identities and the expansion of “home” beyond nationality or borders. She responds to this legacy through her own iconographic language, one that draws on regional typography, Persian and Afghani motifs, Sufi poetry, and the philosophical writings of thinkers such as Suhrawardī and al-Ghazālī, as well as Platonic ideas on the soul’s ascent.

The Eye as The Universe
Rashed’s singular eye functions as what she calls “a mode of access into the figure” and “a portal into becoming.”[16] Sometimes blushing, sometimes erased, the eye may appear as a lone focal point or multiply across the surface like scattered pebbles, guiding the viewer’s journey. In her reading, the eye carries both playfulness and sacred charge; it teases, invites, and opens onto a personal mythology that resists full disclosure. Where Baya’s eye can be protective, invoking the talismanic ‘ayn al-ḥasūd, Rashed’s eye is deliberately permeable - an opening that lets the viewer “swim into the figure” and inhabit its liminal space.[17]

The singularity of the eye is central to her philosophy of form. As she notes, “one eye is more than enough - it acts as a portal on its own.”[18] It embodies the Sufi-inflected notion that a single point can contain the entirety of existence, echoing Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysics of unity. In this sense, the eye becomes a site where the microcosm of the self mirrors the macrocosm of the universe, dissolving the boundaries between the two.

Works of Becoming, The Eye in Practice
In I Am Short On Time (Forfeit) (2020), a triptych painted in tangerine, rose, and white, bodies contort and converge, clutching prayer beads and a dalla (Arabic coffee pot) as white light streams from a plaster-covered eye. This light, emanating from a wound, becomes a life force linking the bodies - at-once a mark of injury and a conduit between the earthly and the spiritual. Painted during a period of personal transition, the palette recalls flesh and blood, mortality and renewal, while also evoking organic hues of flowers and desert earth. The work situates the eye as an organ of healing, reclaiming it from patriarchal injunctions to “lower the gaze” and reframing it as an inward turn toward one’s own wounds.[19]

In Move Endlessly to Let Your Sky Bloom (Your Love Grows Through Me) (2022), the body merges with peaches, daisies, and leaves, elements drawn directly from her family garden and acts of care, such as her father bringing her fruit while she paints. Here, softly rendered eyes are embedded within botanical forms, dissolving the distinction between human figure and natural environment. The gaze becomes vegetal, sensory, diffused - an ecosystemic vision of the self as inseparable from the life-world around it.

Other series, such as her Ahmadi Tree paintings, transpose the eye into arboreal bodies, sometimes doubled to signify reunion, sometimes crowned with halos to suggest transcendence. In I Lay Among My Fire (My Smoke Will Still Remain) (2020), multiple eyes punctuate a veiled, nurturing figure, functioning as guides through an interior cosmology and as vessels carrying ancestral echoes and devotional intimations. In each case, the eye holds compositional and symbolic weight - it orients the viewer, marks the meeting between figuration and abstraction, and renders the figure porous to spiritual and emotional states.

Liminality, Play, and the Ecological Body
Rashed’s flattened compositions resist perspectival depth, instead offering a sensorial immediacy that aligns with her belief in painting as an embodied, instinctive process. Her anonymous figures - sometimes armless, toeless, or hybridised with fruit and foliage - exist in spaces “between heaven and earth,” what she calls “a higher mode of being” that begins “from the speck of an atom and expands into totality.”[20] The eye, in this schema, is a cosmological device: a mutable aperture through which the self and its environment continuously flow into one another.

This ecological-spiritual reading is reinforced by her incorporation of natural forms as coequal presences. The botanical eyes in her paintings underscore an ethos in which seeing is inseparable from belonging, and where vision becomes a form of reciprocity with the natural world.

The Eye as a Feminised Cosmology of Vision
Though shaped by distinct temporal, cultural, and geopolitical conditions - mid-century colonial Algeria and the post-oil contemporary Gulf - Baya Mahieddine and Alymamah Rashed both turn to the eye as a symbolic and formal device through which to negotiate subjectivity, power, and transformation. In both practices, the eye retains its historical charge as a symbol of mysticism, protection, and visual authority, yet is reclaimed as a generative, relational force.

For Baya, working under colonial and patriarchal constraint, the eye becomes a sign of feminine autonomy and imaginative sovereignty. Her painted figures inhabit enclosed, fantastical worlds where vision is mutual and pleasure is central. Rashed, by contrast, repositions the eye within expansive, spiritual ecologies. Detached from fixed identity, her singular eye connects mutable figures to broader networks of relation - ecological, affective, and divine.

In reconfiguring the eye, both artists unsettle dominant visual regimes, offering alternative ways of seeing but also alternative conditions. In this sense, the eye operates as a force through which inherited structures of vision are reworked into feminised, decolonial, and speculative imaginaries.