The sum of the exhibitions, publications and productions from women artists this week provides a more rounded view of gender relations in which to locate the narrowly focused Sixteen Days of Activism for no violence against women and children.
More complex but less accessible than the official fare of speeches, parades and broadcast public messages, these works play a very different role in shaping an understanding of women in society.
The gem of the cultural offerings available is a pricey collection of photographs entitled Women By Women (Wits University Press). The hefty and stylishly laid-out tome celebrates 50 years of women’s photo-graphy and was sponsored by the department of arts and culture.
Few images convey the raw hurt of Cariña Booyens’s self-portrait, whose moist face and uncertain eyes peep from a distant edge of the photograph beneath severely shorn hair, grieving for a mother who died of cancer.
The most haunting image in the book may be Louise Gubb’s distressing shot of a woman in Boipatong grieving for her brother, killed by apartheid forces and left to lie next to her, covered in blood beside an overturned bed and a splattered enamel plate.
Photographs like these do not present women as purely vulnerable creatures subject to violence from those around them. There are stories and histories underlying each of the photographs captured. This statement is undermined, however, by some of the anthropological captioning of some of the photographs, which read “San woman” or “Free State woman.”
Violence against women and children appears in the collection — note Nadine Hutton’s picture of Baby Tshepang’s family — but it is not represented in a uniform way. The grief of the women in Hutton’s photograph contrasts the tension of Jodi Bieber’s section on women who have left abusive relationships.
Women in this book are caught up in formal and struggle politics, relationships, work, family and many other facets of their experience as human beings.
Worth more than R300, it is a beautiful coffee-table book that is not affordable to most South Africans despite purporting to reflect the experiences of over half the population.
Also showing this week is the revival of You Strike a Woman, You Strike A Rock, the classic portrayal of women’s fight against an unjust system, at the Market Theatre. This play portrays women’s role in society in an active way, contributing to the struggle against apartheid, despite the odds that include sexual harassment and restrictive traditional views of women.
Another exhibit that opens up the experience of women beyond their role as victims of domestic violence is the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s Women: Photography and the New Media; Imaging the Self and Body through Portraiture.
Domestic abuse does not feature explicitly but the exhibit throws gender into relief, examining the spectrum of norms that domestic violence ties into.
The introductory write-up to the exhibition conditions the audience to interpret everything as portraiture. This label is applied to works ranging from more conventional head-to-toe photographs of teenagers to a wooden chest on a carpet and a minute-long audio clip of a girl saying, “He couldn’t find me.”
After reading the introduction, I was surprised to find that the first works were two full-length images of fashionably dressed men. But by forcing one to view the exhibit through the lens of portraiture and to understand the works as reflecting the photographer’s gendered experiences, the show makes the audience consider what the works could say about how gender operates to construct subjects.
Despite the exhibition’s conscious efforts to give women photographers a platform, no one came to see the work in the hour that I was there. This despite the crowds of people clustered outside the green fence separating the gallery’s space from Joubert Park.
Nadine Hutton’s exhibit of her mother’s story of domestic abuse at Constitutional Hill attracted a slightly larger crowd on that dreary Sunday afternoon.
The searing tale is documented in a flier and illustrated by a series of snapshot-like photographs of largely domestic scenes, hung on the walls of an unassuming room.
The documentary function of the exhibit titled Written on Her Face opens the doors to a very private experience, providing a more personal look at an issue that is sterilised through statistics on domestic violence.
Her mother, Madeline Bernardo, is revealed as a survivor and not a passive object of pity in her conclusion that “one thing is for sure: the person I am now will never allow the kind of abuse I suffered when I was younger”.
One visitor interpreted the exhibit as a call to action. “The message is what can we do about it, this has been happening or is happening, what can we as a community do about it,” a Kenyan man interpreted. The second party to visit the show in my half-hour there, he told me that his veiled wife who speaks no English agreed with him.
While Hutton’s exhibit is accessible in its vivid story and straight-forward images, Jacki McInnes’s sculptural exhibit Patterns in Silence at the nearby Women’s Jail is a more abstract treatment of domestic violence.
Copper sheeting, lead, steel and kitchen knives are some of the materials that McInnes uses to “visually interrogate social and psychological factors associated specifically with infanticide”.
The exhibition, which explicitly marks the Sixteen Days of Activism against gender-based violence, will open this Friday with a discussion titled Making Rights Real — Empowerment to Action.
Engaged more by the research underlying this work than the ability of the pieces to convey the reasons why women might kill their babies and how the legal system responds to them, this exhibit could be a positive step in opening up the space to that discussion.
McInnes is more concerned with the silences shrouding such topics and not the abusive situation itself, but this exhibit will operate in a very different way to address that point than one focusing on the voices of the women and communities involved.
The events
Women: Photography and New Media; Imaging the Self and Body through Portraiture runs at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until February 28, Klein Street, Joubert Park, Johannesburg. On November 21 at 6pm attend a panel discussion around the conceptual and critical concerns of women working in photography and new media today with Terry Kurgan, Ingrid Masondo, Melissa Mboweni, Jo Ractliffe, Usha Seejarim, Penny Siopis and Tracy Murinik. Tel: (011) 725 3130.
The book Women by Women: 50 Years of Women’s Photography in South Africa is edited by Robun Compley, George Hallett and Neo Ntsoma and is introduced by Penny Siopis. Published by Wits University Press. Tel: (011) 484 5907.
Jacki McInnes’s exhibition Patterns in Silence runs at the Women’s Jail, Constitution Hill, 1 Kotze Street, Braamfontein, until January 3 2007. Tel: (011) 381 3100.
Nadine Hutton’s exhibition Written on Her Face shows at Constitution Hill, 1 Kotze Street, Braamfontein, until December 15. Tel: (011) 381 3100.
The play You Strike A Woman, You Strike A Rock is directed by Phyllis Klotz and stars Connie Chiume, Poppy Tsira and Busi Zokufa. It runs until December 3. At the Barney Simon Theatre, Market Theatre Complex, Newtown. Book at Computicket. Tel: (011) 832 1641.