OFF THE BEATEN PATH:
Re-exposing
Violence Against Women
Image from AddShots.
An exhibition hosted by Art Works for Change, Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women, and Art “[addresses] violence against women and girls globally and their basic human rights to a safe and secure life. The beauty of this project is that it combines the highest integrity of art with important social messaging and storytelling to help create awareness, inspiration, and address systems for positive social change and action.” Program partners include Amnesty International, the Global Fund for Women, UNIFEM, UNESCO, and Art for Amnesty. The exhibit explores violence against women from several perspectives: from the individual, within the family, within the community, in culture, and in politics.
OTBP will be featured in the Global Health Odyssey Museum in Atlanta from the June 6 to September 23.
From the curator, Randy Jayne Rosenberg:
When we encounter violence against women, we often experience a sort of blindness. We choose not to see devastation of domestic violence, calling it “a family affair”. Honor-killings of women…become nothing more than a “cultural difference”.
We ask the artists to help us create a new vocabulary–new representations–through their artworks and, in doing so, heal us, transform us and help us feel and understand the essence of the problem of violence against women.
Photo From the IRC Global Crescendo Project.
The photography installation Voices from the Field was by far the most effective work I saw from the Virtual Tour. The IRC Global Crescendo Project distributed digital cameras to women in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Cote d’Ivoire, all war zones. Voices from the Field is a disturbingly candid photographic representation of violence against women in war zones. In a self portrait, Assetou “told villagers her husband beats her if dinner is not ready for him.” The photo captures her pounding maize with one hand and holding a child to suck on her breast on the other.
Another caption writes, “Teenage and very young girls are the favorite targets [of rape]. The rapist is often a member or friend of the extended family…in one case a widow settled with the man who had raped her 10-year-old daughter for…$13.35.”
I have selected a few more works an commentary from the exhibit, find it under the cut. To see more of the collection, take a Virtual Tour of OTBP at Art Works for Change.
Image from AWFC.
Art Works for Change will be featuring OFF THE BEATEN PATH/AFRICA, an adaptation of the original OTBP adapted to West Africa, focused on the communities of Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria. OFF THE BEATEN PATH/AFRICA will be featured in the French Cultural Center in Dakar, Senegal, from July 12 to August 31.
Miwa Yanagi‘s My Grandmothers captures the projected futures of several young Japanese women whom she interviewed online, asking them how they foresaw their future. To her surprise, they did not dread aging and did not conform to the image of a traditional silent woman in Japanese society. Instead, they saw their old age filled with respect, power, and adventure. In her photographs, she interprets their responses into photographs that depict strong old ladies who are free to express themselves however they like.
In The Sleeping Self, Polish artist Gabriela Morawetz explores the dichotomous meaning of the bed–on one hand, a bed offers dreams, rest, and comfort; on the other, beds are crime scenes, where trust is destroyed and the body violated. Morawetz’s beds feature strange objects, such as light filaments, bubbles, or glass balls. From the Virtual Tour: “As in a dream, these images are removed from any particular time and place. Sometimes the figure is missing altogether, leaving the viewer wondering what has happened to the vulnerable sleeper.”
Photo taken from Art Works for Change.
The photo above depicts a scene from a Yoko Inoue performance peace. From the Virtual Tour: “In some communities, where direct intervention is culturally impossible, women respond to severe domestic violence by assembling outside of the household in question and bang out an alarm on pots and pans. This informs the man that the spirit he attempts to break belongs to many, not one.”
OTBP Photos from individual artists’ websites: Miwa Yanagi [Kwanyi and Tsumugi] and Gabriela Morawetz [Voyage de noces ...].
