The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum is hosting a collaborative project and exhibition by the Keiskamma Art Project and Artcollab Studio. The project brings attention through the voices of artists to the impact of Gender Based Violence in our society.
Courtesy of Artcollab Studio.
This project brought five resident artists – Anelisa Nyongo, Nombulelo Paliso, Sanela Maxengana, Siya Maswana and Veronica Betani – from the Keiskamma Artists’ Collective, together with four visiting artists – Deborah Weber, Elgin Rust, Jolene Cartmill, and Luntu Vumazonke – from Artcollab studio on a week-long residency in Hamburg in the Eastern Cape. The artists surfaced Gender Based Violence (GBV) as a largely hidden and unaddressed social issue pertinent at the local village level and deeply rooted within South African social life. The collaboration is based on first-person lived experiences and represents localised, rural experiences of GBV.
Gender-based violence is rooted in patriarchal power imbalances and is carried out to humiliate and subordinate. This type of violence is deeply rooted in the norms and values that govern society. In South Africa, high and rising femicide, which is the intentional murder of women because they are women, is a situated form of GBV. Other forms include human trafficking, mutilation, rape, domestic violence, even accepted customary practices like ukuthwala and normalised medical, obstetric violence. GBV is inclusive of sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological dimensions of violence and can include threats, coercion and the denial of freedom and autonomy. Because gendered violence is rooted in gender inequalities, violence against women and girls is the most common crime yet also the least punished crime in the world. GBV undermines the health, dignity, security, and well-being of its victims and is perpetuated within a culture of silence and denial.
By sharing personal stories, open-hearted listening, conducting research, reading, and discussion, the body of work produced includes soundscapes, prints, costumes, sculptures, and video art. Underpinned by an ethos of equality, advocacy, and activism, our work together surfaced four thematic aspects of GBV:
Safe Spaces: This theme emerged as powerful rhetoric, longing, and agential capacity in the work. It acted as a rhetorical question probing artistic enquiry and generating an agential capacity for change.
Silence: Don’t stay silent was a pressing imperative at the heart of our joint project. Silence keeps GBV hidden from view, in contrast to speaking up, which outs GBV within the community.
Speaking Up: We recognise the courage it takes for both perpetrators and survivors to speak out about GBV. Speaking up means decisively taking a stand to end the scourge of GBV.
Institutional Structures: To remove GBV from our society, existing social norms must change, we need services and support for survivors and a robust legal and judicial system to ensure reparative justice.
In the video and artworks, these thematic aspects are woven together across five stories that profile A Traditional Xhosa Woman, A Warrior Womxn, Men Against GBV, The Whistle Blower, and Tavern Girls. As artists from different backgrounds, in our collaborative, transdisciplinary, and cross-cultural methodology, we communicated ideas using metaphors, symbols, insignia, and colours. We worked with effect and evocation at multiple visual, vocal, material, and intuitive levels.
The exhibition will be on view from the 16th of March until the 22nd of May, 2024. For more information, please visit the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum of Art.
