The Hammam

A young woman, covered by a single white cloth, enters a golden, Byzantine hammam, accompanied by two other tired companions. From three fake windows of the arch under which the group rests, frescoes of three young lovers look down, expressing surprise and desire.

Salvi’s crafted dream, more in line with the 19th-century fanciful idea of the Middle East, is an implicit critique of the dehumanizing and sexualized gaze of men towards women: the exhausted and drowsy young women are the objects of the observer’s gaze, as well as that of fictitious painted characters.

Both gazes rest on the exposed bodies of the girls—like objects of desire—in their moment of greatest privacy and vulnerability, and it seems that these women are aware of it and almost resigned.