Portraits of Lebanon’s domestic workers confront social prejudices
Lebanese artist Chaza Charafeddine explores the dreams and discrimination of domestic workers by making them dress up as their heroes.
“If you are a maid in Lebanon, everyone sees you as inferior. Others don't think that you may have dreams of your own,” Hana, a 23-year-old domestic worker from Ethiopia, said.
But, for an entire month, Hana felt herself turn into a “star,” when she became one of the 10 models in a photography exhibition titled “Maidames” at Beirut’s Agial Art Gallery.
The exhibition, by Lebanese artist Chaza Charafeddine, portrayed 10 domestic workers in clothes and poses of the figures they admire, from Madonna and Shakira to Jackie Kennedy. The exhibition, with its tongue-in-cheek play of words with “maids” and “madams,” meaning female employers, aimed to challenge the societal prejudices around those employed under the controversial kafala, the sponsorship system to monitor migrant workers.
The figures the domestic workers were portrayed as, such as Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich, were held in reverence not only by the domestic workers themselves but by their employers, the so-called "madams," Charafeddine told Al-Monitor.
