Hshouma is a word that has always cut off several conversations… but it is also the title of the current project of Zainab Fasiki. The project aims at using art to break some taboos in Morocco.
Violence based on gender discrimination is the result of years of familial and social education. This led many generations to not accept differences, individual freedom and to cover bodies that are only percieved as sexual objects to respect.

Thus, the project Hshouma explores the theme of shame and taboos related to nudity and sex.
Zainab Fasiki’s protagonists are drawn in black and white, deprived from their iris. As they are represented in such a manner, these heroines can bring to mind women under different social roles: mothers, sisters, friends that make the collective imaginary.
Also, the presented women in the project Hshouma do not reveal their bodies only, but also their need for freedom through the texts in Darija or in English. Sometimes, these texts are imbedded in recurrent discourses within families and societies.

Hshouma is an invitation to liberate these bodies from this perspective. By drawing naked people, Zainab Fasiki wishes to break the shackles. Depicting nudity is not an act of sexualization, but rather a tool of repositioning humans in the physical environment that composes our universe.
With the project Hshouma, Zainab Fasiki encourages us and the societies that we make and are part of, to displace our taboos, and invites us to rethink our relation to bodies through an artistic vision.

Documentation
• Website of the project
• Leaflet of the exhibition
• Past press

Press
• “Hshouma, le projet de Zainab Fasiki contre les tabous, exposé au Cube à Rabat” in Al HuffPost Maghreb
• “Rabat La bédéiste Marocaine Zainab Fasiki présente au grand public son projet féministe Hshouma” in Article19.ma
• Zainab Fasiki, la féministe et bédéiste se bat contre les tabous ! in Farouche

“L’art pour dénoncer le harcèlement sexuel” by ARTE