Olaf Metzel’s sculpture Turkish Delight was neither aimed at shock and confrontation nor at a political compromise. It purposefully evaded any definite categorization. This was exactly why it caused a scandal.

The viewer found himself facing a nude female body. Only the head was covered with a scarf that left the face free. The veiling of the head revealed the cultural and political exploitation and exposure of the female body in a highly charged manner. When looking at the body there

could be no doubt that it was jammed between nudity and veiling, that it was burdened with different notions and fantasies of nakedness – male and female, cultural and aesthetic, historical and present-day attitudes. In the Stuttgarter Staatsgalerie, the bronze of the young woman had still been positioned in the context of modernist sculptures next to works by Lehmbruck and Zadkine as well as Matisse’s Back Series. In Vienna, the woman left the protective space of the institution. The response was vehement and ended in an act of vandalism.

In Islam, public nudity is under a taboo. Even covered hair is interpreted as a sexual attraction. While the naked female body is considered a place of sin in the Christian tradition, it constitutes the scene of a pornographic economization of desire in the liberal climate of Western societies’ neo-paganism, but at the same time features as a symbol of women’s self-determination and as an expression of their emancipation. In the history of European art,

the depiction of the nude female body has been a constituent of the repertoire of mythological representation and the history of scandals, which also encompasses the exotic

fantasies of the Orient of past times (harem, Turkish bath).

The body of Metzel’s anything but “honey-sweet” nude told a more serious story. And it raised a number of questions: What does a woman’s status in an Islamic society reveal? What about the individual leeway remaining in face of the ubiquity of nude female bodies in the sexualized public sphere of the West? Can nudity still be an act of liberation after all?