Bubblegum Club

Tag: catcalling

  • Cherrie Bomb // exhibiting the effects of the male on the female

    Cherrie Bomb // exhibiting the effects of the male on the female

    This is not an attempt to fight the man.

    Nor is it an attempt to latch onto social campaigns like #MenAreTrash and #MeToo.

    Cherrie Bomb is a collection of lived experiences that express what it feels like to be a womxn in a patriarchal society.

    Curated by Nthabiseng Lethoko for Umuzi’s First Thursdays, Cherrie Bomb aims to interrogate and shed light on the norms of patriarchy and toxic masculinity. For a female audience, the exhibition is supposed to be representative and voice the daily subjugation of the female body. For the male audience, the exhibition is meant to be the mirror that prompts self-examination. Ultimately, the exhibition aims to demystify the severe effects that male dominance has over womxn.

    The pieces featured in the exhibition are all by womxn.

    ‘Safe Space’ by Botshelo Mondi & Motshewa Khaiyane

    Botshelo Mondi and Motshew Khaiyane explored the creation of safe spaces. The threat of patriarchy is an accepted norm in every public and private environment and the female body in particular is affected as a result. Essentially, this body of work titled, Safe Space, seeks to express the problems or politics of space as well as the subtlety and pervasive nature of patriarchy. The work comes from visualising patriarchy as a physical mass that occupies and intrudes in a way that marginalises and overlooks its victims.

    In Boitumelo Mazibuko’s Lobola photographs, she captures how this traditional ceremony places value on her, value that she did not consent to, which ultimately makes her a possession. Even though the beauty of the ceremony is acknowledged through its celebration of the women joining her partner’s family, the  treatment of her as an asset can lead to her demise.

    ‘Lobola’ by Boitumelo Mazibuko

    Basetsana Maluleka and Nompumelelo Mdluli interrogate the accountability that womxn are supposed to have for men’s actions and expectations in The Constant.

    Tshepiso Mabula examines how the male gaze has made the female figure subservient and an unimportant item placed on the periphery through her work titled The Gaze. This work aims to shift this portrayal and show women as defiant figures that reject patriarchal standards by defiling the female figure.

    ‘The Gaze’ by Tshepiso Mabula

    Lastly, Thakirah Allie’s Hey Sexy is a multimedia series documenting the everyday phenomena of street harassment and catcalling. Since 2016, the project has developed and infested from sharing the artist’s own experiences of it, to that of other young girls and womxn in and around the public spaces of Cape Town.

    Regardless of gender, we are accustomed to the expectations and consequences of patriarchy. Toxic masculinity, a distressing by-product of the system, has daily repercussions for anything and anyone unlike it. The necessity of this exhibition is undeniable and the conversations it intends to spark will be vital to reimagining our society.

    Cherrie Bomb’s first exhibition took place in Cape Town and will soon be in Johannesburg during another Umuzi’s First Thursdays.

    ‘The Constant’ by Basetsana Maluleka & Nompumelelo Mdluli

  • Thakirah Allie’s Hey Sexy // Countering Catcalling by Claiming the Narrative

    “This led me to only focus on how this makes women feel – about themselves, about their bodies, about their spaces in society and about the ways in which they (including myself) are constantly trying to negotiate spaces.”

    In a #metoo world, where the imminent threat of violation and violence reverberates through each pavement-step you take. Whether spaces are brimming, witnessed or vacant – the uninvited, unrequited gaze still leaves a chill. Eyes downcast, breath muttering, slouching smaller, smaller still. Small enough to escape unscathed – this time.

    Artist Thakirah Allie has shared in the daily experience of sexual harassment. Her project, Hey Sexy, was born out of “anger and frustration from years of being catcalled and sometimes even groped”when she first moved to Cape Town.“I always wanted to fight back in some sort of way, but I felt too young back then.” After leaving the country and subsequently returning, her perceptions of safety and space had shifted.

    One day when leaving a train station in Cape Town,“a guy tried to grab my arm, I pulled back immediately, and he started saying all sorts of things to me. There was a security guard right next to him. He just looked at me and did nothing. This was sort of the last straw for me and in that moment, I came up with an idea to make a documentary about it.”“At the time, I would also record my own experiences through the audio recorder on my phone. Every time I got catcalled, I would speak into it. This made me feel safe and also allowed me to explore my voice in both a physical and metaphorical level.”

    “I had an idea that catcalling is like a microcosm of rape culture because it is the normalized and somewhat accepted treatment of women in public. Street harassment is something that is universal but women of colour do experience it more. This is not only because we make use of public transport spaces more often but it is also because of the way we have been portrayed and grossly objectified in the greater society. So even though I had all of this lived experience” Thakirah has created an archive and platform of the experience of womxn – both as visual and auditory accounts. What is so striking about these stories is how relatable they are – highlighting this as a systemic issue.

    “Often there is a misconception that it is only a certain type of man that catcalls. But this not true. I used myself and started noting every time I got catcalled. It was an array of men. Men in cars. Men in the streets. Working or not. Different races. I was experiencing different types of catcalling from different types of men. Whether I was covered or showing skin, I would still be catcalled. Because I am female, the men felt compelled to say something to me, to stop me, to force me to acknowledge their presence.”

    To counter being violated by the male gaze, womxn often engage in self-editing practices – censoring our clothes, manner, the way we move and take up space. Time and time again these tactics are not effective because on a societal level, harassment is less about desire than it is about power.“ So it’s important for us to have these conversations over and over again until the spaces of healing outweighs the spaces of pain. Until we create safer spaces for people to move around freely in. But also for us to find our own ways of expressing any pain that we may have experienced from being female in this South African landscape. I have seen way too many women who have lost parts of themselves as a result of a man not respecting their space, mind and body. This has affected me deeply”

    “I’m going to make my own narratives, in my own way and on my own terms. A shift will happen, I believe that.”