by Anna Daly. 

The artist Deanna Hitti takes on some big, gnarly themes in her work. The power Orientalist tropes continue to exert over perceptions of the Middle East is one of them, as Mezze, her large-scale installation currently on show at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, makes clear.For all that, Hitti’s immediate aim is relatively modest. As she puts it, ‘It’s about starting a conversation.’
        Prints have been the backbone of Hitti's practice, prompting conversations about art, identity and politics for over two decades. Her recent forays into cyanotyping are no exception, with her reproductions of Orientalist classics such as Gentile Bellini’s Mehmet II (1480) and J.A.D. Ingres’ Grande Odalisque (1814), daringly summoning the appeal of the originals without shying away from their sinister implications. 


Orientalism

Orientalism refers to a longstanding European practice of studying and representing the Orient, which, critically speaking, is founded on the presumption of an inherent difference between “the Orient” and “the Occident”. As Edward Said demonstrated in his landmark 1978 text of the same name, these differences came to be institutionalised in an idea of 'Oriental backwardness, degeneracy, and inequality with the West.' [1]
        Said's is by no means the first or the last word in the diverse field of postcolonial study, but his focus on the Arabic-speaking world lends his analysis a special resonance with Hitti's project. As a contemporary Australian artist of Lebanese descent, she too seeks to rectify the distortion and dehumanisation that has legitimised colonial expansion.
        One of Hitti's particular concerns is the entwinement of Orientalism with the objectification of women. In another landmark text from the 1970s, John Berger's Ways of Seeing, Ingres' Grande Odalisque is presented as a prime example of how the male gaze operates. The very embodiment of this sexualised, subjugating mode of viewership, the Odalisque's expression is characterised by Berger as that 'of a woman responding with calculated charm to the man whom she imagines looking at her – although she doesn’t know him. She is offering up her femininity as the surveyed.'[2]
        Berger's sentiments are echoed in Said's assessment of the sexism inherent to Orientalism, in which the latter is described as an outlook that keeps 'intact the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability.'[3]
        Drawing on the unique qualities of cyanotypes, Hitti harnesses and redirects the objectifying gaze, subtly restaging Grande Odalisque and other similarly paradigmatic works to destabilise their power. The dark inky hue produced through the printing compound's exposure to light replaces the pigments and textures of the originals with shades of just one colour flattened to a single plane. The printmaking process accentuates this effect, enlarging and multiplying exotica including hookah pipes, jewellery and other bodily adornments to reveal the repetitiveness embedded in the fixation on difference that is Orientalism's currency. Viewed as prints en masse and in succession, the paintings become increasingly generic and interchangeable.
        In some prints, paintings do merge. In others, details, backgrounds and framing fade or dissolve into recesses of blue. The sepulchral colour tone and the stony grain of the substrate add to an impression of images deteriorating through time.
        An erotic charge still hovers over Hitti's transcriptions, perhaps unavoidably given the tone of the source material. The faces of courtesans and slaves emerge from shadowy depths, the models rarely meeting the eyes of their onlookers, their vulnerabilities accentuated by varying states of undress. The allure is only intensified by the rich, fibrous papers saturated with a seemingly unfathomable depth of colour. Bound into books such as Artbook Volume Arba'ah (Four) (2016) and Assimilated Museum (2015), these exquisite prints invite touch and lend the encounter a further intimacy by encouraging the lingering engagement associated with private perusal. The overriding sense, however, is of a reduction to type, with François Boucher, Ingres, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Paul Trouillebert and Charles Landelle coming across as mere purveyors of a bizarre antique fantasy. The central intrigue shifts from women and the Orient to the style of thinking and mode of representation Orientalist paintings engender.

Ambassadorial paintings

The ambassadorial pictures Hitti reproduces tell more complicated stories about encounters between the East and the West, undermining the strict demarcations between categories of identity essential to the Orientalising mindset by exposing the inseparability of social, political and cultural status embedded in cross-cultural contact.
        There is a certain degree of reciprocity between the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe in Bellini's portrait of Mehmet II, for example. The painting is undeniably European in terms of genre and technique—Phillip Mansel describes it as a 'portrait of the Sultan, framed as a Renaissance prince.'[4] Resulting from Mehmet's own request for a European artist at the Topkapi Palace, and the Doge of Venice's interest in strengthening ties with Istanbul by sending Bellini to fulfil that role, however, it is also expressive of the Sultan's power and influence.
        Hitti's selection of Turquerie-themed works—pictures capturing an eighteenth-century Western European craze for all things purportedly Turkish—is similarly resistant to singular interpretation. There is a print of the Genevan artist Jean-Étienne Liotard's pastel Self Portrait (1744), which is both a 'funhouse mirror of Oriental fantasy' and an articulation of something closer to the genuine cultural exchange that comes from living and working across multiple cultures and geographies.[5] Liotard's mode of dress and the self-portraits he produced are often considered a branding exercise, allowing him to differentiate himself in a highly competitive market by capitalising on the fashion for Turkish-themed goods. Produced in Vienna, the 1744 portrait exemplifies this approach, the original depicting the artist in a long beard and fur căciulă in front of the inscription 'known as the Turkish painter'. That said, the Self Portrait is less a confection than many of the Turquerie-themed pictures upon which Liotard's reputation rested. His unique sartorial style was cultivated during his five-year stint as an artist in Turkey and Moldavia, and he continued to dress this way until his death in 1789, long after the fashion for Turquerie had peaked. His work, moreover, was esteemed in Ottoman circles as well as in English, Dutch and French embassies. He was invited to produce portraits of the Grand Vizier and other members of the Sultan's household when he lived in Istanbul; and, at the request of the reigning prince of Moldavia, he became the court artist at Jassy.[6]
        Another Turquerie-themed painting Hitti reproduces, Giuseppina Grassini in the role of Zaire, which was painted in London in 1805 by the French aristocrat Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, is equally complex. On one hand, the painting extends a chain of commodification prompted by the popularity of Voltaire's 1732 tragedy in which a Christian slave falls in love with a Muslim prince. As well as further promoting the opera and its star performer, Vigée Le Brun's celebration of the well-known singer in the title role leverages the success of the production to advance her own career. By the same token, the painting testifies to significant social and political upheavals betraying profound uncertainties at the heart of Western European identity. Significantly, Vigée Le Brun was the casualty of one longstanding regime's collapse, her exile in England the result of the French Revolution.[7] No less significant is the work's subject and authorship. As a painting by a woman known for her skill at the easel that depicts another woman known for her work on the stage, it represents the greater visibility of women in Western European public life.


Hitti's careful selection and treatment, based partly on how well the images respond to the printmaking process, allows the artist to capture the nuances and subvert the stereotyping that results from cross-cultural encounters. She also likes the prints to register her presence, leaving behind the traces of handling that allow the images to surface. Bound into sumptuous volumes and interspersed with pages of Arabic text, the prints gesture towards the primacy of books and manuscripts in the art histories of the Arabic-speaking world.
        Her installations take a different approach, offsetting the monumentality and granular fixations of the Orientalist tradition with spectacular affirmations of contemporary life and culture. In Mezze, and its earlier iteration K is for Kitab Tabakh (cookbook) from 2024, grids comprising dozens of cyanotypes are relegated to a background role and large, colourful, gleaming tableware and piped Royal Icing readymades take centre stage. The backdrop literally fades, the right-hand side of the grid mirroring in a dulled, grey palette the luxuriant blue of the left. Signs of modern-day culture and migration further interrupt the exoticising impulse in Orientalist art. These include overlays of romanised Arabic text in contrasting hues, and inset images evoking Hitti's mother's recipes. In Mezze, two columns of prints reference the North and South Mole Lighthouses at the entrance to Fremantle Harbour, which, bearing the same colours as the Lebanese flag, caused Hitti's mother a moment of disorientation as she approached her new home.
        The assemblages are as shiny, colourful and bold as the backdrop is murky, celebrating the sculptural polish of everyday objects sourced from Hitti's home and those of local community members. Tiers of ornate glass- and silver-ware top precise configurations of coffee cups, saucers, Turkish tea glasses, teaspoons and dessert forks meticulously trimmed with vivid red, yellow, gold and green icing. The printmaking and patisserie workshops Hitti holds over the course of her exhibitions breathe extra life into the installations, highlighting the importance of communal processes, customs and rituals to cultural survival.
        Hitti's interest in bringing people together has been inspired by her mother and draws attention to the roles women have traditionally played in maintaining a sense of community, starkly contrasting with the highly sexualised languour of Orientalism's nudes. As Cher Tan writes, this aspect of Hitti's endeavour 'underscores how culinary practices become repositories of cultural memory, binding generations and communities together across geographical distances while taking cultural differences into account'.[8] Decoration plays a vital role in this context. Seamlessly blending the aesthetics of the Australian Women's Weekly with Middle Eastern hospitality, elaborate, star-piped trimmings and beautiful, banquet-style arrangements of food demonstrate love as well as invite everyone to the table.

Conclusion

When it comes to preserving cultures, the protection of treasured artefacts is often the focus. Hitti's incorporation of the fleeting and ever-changing into her practice honours the extensive, mostly invisible labour that is also necessary. Making, eating, talking, and cleaning up leave fewer lasting traces than stone monuments, but they can also be more subversive, challenging convenient stereotypes through the subtlety, nuance and honesty brought about by constant interaction. It is by entertaining these dangerous pleasures that Hitti is able to effectively question dominant narratives, rounding out the official record with the pop and fizz of life being lived.

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Footnotes: 

1. Edward Said, Orientalism, UK: Penguin, 1978, 2003, p. 206.

2. John Berger, 'Three', Ways of Seeing, https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/ch3, Accessed on July 16th, 2026.

3. Edward Said, Orientalism, p. 206.

4. Phillip Mansel, 'Friend or Foe? The Ottoman Empire and Europe from Mehmed II to William II'  in Inan Suna and Ipek Kurac, Intersecting Worlds: Ambassadors and Painters,Pera Museum, 2014; 2016, p.11.

5. Dr Gizem Tongo and Irvin Cemil Schick, 'Turquerie', Pera Museum, https://www.peramuseum.org/blog/turquerie/15602019, 14 (1-17), Accessed on July 15th, 2026.

6. Kristel Smentek, 'Looking East: Jean Etienne Liotard, the Turkish Painter' in Ars Orientalis 39, 2010, p. 90-91

7. Veronique Leonard-Roques and Sophie Mesplede, 'Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun', The Digital Encyclopedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century [online], Accessed on July 15th, 2026, URL: https://www.digitens.org/en/notices/elisabeth-vigee-le-brun.html

8. Cher Tan, 'Vulnerable Intimacies' in Liminal, June 21st, 2024. https://www.liminalmag.com/blog/vulnerable-intimacies. Accessed on July 15th, 2026. 

Images courtesy of the artist. Photography by  Robert Frith.