Princess Hijab Targets half-naked fashion ads in France's Metro

Grafitti artist mocks burqa ban

Princess Hijab Targets half-naked fashion ads in France's Metro

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Striking at night with dripping black paint, she slaps Muslim veils on the half-naked airbrushed women and men of the Metro's fashion adverts. Her guerilla niqab art has been exhibited from New York to Vienna, sparking debates about feminism and fundamentalism, yet her identity remains a mystery.

In secular republican France, there can hardly be a more potent visual gag than scrawling graffitied veils on fashion ads. Under the 'burqa ban', approved last month, from next year it will be illegal for a woman to wear full-face Muslim veils in public.

Through this, Princess Hijab's simple, almost childlike, acts of sabotage manage to unsettle. If she is a religious fundamentalist making a point about female flesh, she leaves a witty smattering of buttock and midriff on display. If she is a feminist making a point about exploitation, it is odd that she always flees the scene of her crimes.

She has agreed to meet as she scours stations for targets for her next 'niqab intervention'. In stretch fabric tights, shorts and a hoodie, with a long black wig obscuring her face, one thing is clear; the twenty-something does not wear the niqab that has become her own signature. She will not say if she is a Muslim. In fact, it is more than likely that Princess Hijab isn't even a woman. "The real identity behind Princess Hijab is of no importance," says the husky voice behind the wig. "The imagined self has taken the foreground, and anyway it's an artistic choice."

Her work now usually stays up for only 45 minutes to an hour before Metro staff rip it down. But each is carefully photographed and has an afterlife online.

"I use veiled women as a challenge," she says. "The veil has many hidden meanings: it can be as profane as it is sacred, consumerist and sanctimonious."

She sees herself as part of a new 'graffiti of minorities' reclaiming the streets. "If it was only about the burqa ban, my work wouldn't have a resonance for very long. But I think the burqa ban has given a global visibility to the issue of integration in France."

She adds, "Liberty, equality, fraternity, that's a republican principle, but in reality the issue of minorities in French society hasn't really evolved in half a century. The outsiders in France are still the poor, the Arabs, black and of course, the Roma."

Niqab Bitches

Earlier this year two women also protested the burqa ban in a unique manner. Called the niqab bitches, they walked the streets of Paris scantily-dressed by wearing niqabs and little else.

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