Bubblegum Club

Tag: female body

  • 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
  • Multimedia artist Ruth Angel Edwards on tracing and revealing the “sub” in culture.

    Multimedia artist Ruth Angel Edwards on tracing and revealing the “sub” in culture.

    Ruth Angel Edwards is a multimedia artist whose work explores the communication of ideology through pop culture, drawing from mainstream and subcultural youth movements both past and present. Within these, she looks at the ways audio and visual content are used to manipulate an audience and to disseminate information. This is especially apparent in her exhibition High Life/Petrification shown at the À CÔTÉ DU 69, which marked the end of her residency in Los Angeles, CA. In this exhibition, social detritus collected from the location reveals a mythologised Venice Beach as a “ritual site of pilgrimage, a space where diverse subcultural histories continue to make it a mecca for fans of alternative histories as well as touristic voyeurs.”

    Feminism, gender, collectivity and commodification are recurring themes. In particular, this brings to mind Edwards’ exhibition Enema Salvatore, held in Turin at the end of another art residency, showing new work at the Almanac Inn. The work questions the binary structures of western culture, the duality of good and bad. A cycle of ingestion, consumption, digestion, purification – and then finally – release, all explored through and within her own female body, whilst drawing external parallels to the “wellness/feel good” food industry. Hedonism, spectacle and rebellion are deconstructed and re-formed to create communicative and insightful immersive works.

    Edwards has been expanding on these themes in her most recent exhibition Wheel of the Year! EFFLUENT PROFUNDAL ZONE! commissioned by the Bonington Gallery as the first exhibition of 2018. An immersive installation invited the viewer to consider the inescapable cycles of waste and decay, a by-product of all our consumption, personal or material. Drawing clever parallels between overlapping ecologies – “from the futile pursuit of personal purification and ‘clean living’ to the increasingly rapid turnover of cultural content in the media and popular consciousness, to the wider perspective of the waste which is polluting our oceans, and threatening our very existence”– Edward’s makes the observation that the only difference is that of differing scale, and utilises art’s ability to evoke empathy and re-orient our often very narrow-minded subjectivities.

    Using video, audio, sculpture, performance and printed media, subcultures and social debris are historicised, tracing their trajectories and examining the wider socio-economic environments which give rise to them. Edwards traces the complex symbiotic relationship between the underground and the mainstream, while exposing their failures and flaws as well as any under-celebrated histories and latent positive potential. Edwards continues to explore personal cycles of consumption and waste, natural functions that are transformed and inescapably politicised as they connect with global capitalist economies.

    Ruth Angel Edwards studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and currently lives and works in London. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally at Arcadia Missa Auto Italia South East, Tate Modern (London), FACT, Royal Standard (Liverpool), Human Resources, (Los Angeles) and MEYOHAS Gallery, (New York).

    Be sure to check out her website to see more of her work.

  • Thinking about de-gendering as a route to personhood

    Thinking about de-gendering as a route to personhood

    So the first time I encountered the term ‘cisgender’ was on my colourful Twitter timeline. Some troll was ignorantly spewing his privilege and a beautiful bisexual boy that I follow called the troll a “cisgender straight white male” while telling him to take several seats.

    After tediously Googling the term, I was informed that being “cisgender” means that your gender identity matches the sex that you were assigned at birth. So basically when you were born your physical attributes, which are anatomically and physiologically predetermined, and your internal conviction that you are either male or female, plus the cultural behavioural expressions of those convictions, all marry each other harmoniously.

    When the beautiful bisexual boy was calling out that troll, “cisgender” sounded like a swear word because how could one body have so much hegemonic power, such unadulterated privilege. It seemed obscene until I realised I am cisgender and confronting this privilege was bewildering since other components that make up my identity, such as race, nationality, sex and sexuality are not necessarily hegemonic.

    Initially, I was confronted by my cisgender privilege a couple of years ago when I approached a public restroom that did not have the universal male or female signage. Instead the figure on the door was just a person, which I certainly am, but this privilege of fitting comfortably at one end of the sex/gender binary made me question if I even belonged in that gender neutral space because hello hi, the entire world has created public restrooms, and every other space, on the dominant societal  assumption that everyone is cisgender. This prolonged perpetuation of the sex/gender binary has caused for the maintenance of gender inequality. As a human being dedicated to the decolonisation of my mind, walk through this with me as I unpack how de-gendering is crucial to decolonisation (decolonisation in this context being the undoing of hegemonic “norms” and mindsets.)

    Firstly, let’s get this one thing clear, “nature” does not dictate how we perform gender, instead we do as producers of our culture. The assignment of sex at birth is based on our understanding of gender identity. So girls have uteruses and boys have penises. This basic arrangement of gender and other various subtle and overt arrangements of gender are reproduced socially by power structures in order to shape individual action, and because of the histories of the powers that be, these arrangements appear solid.  Therefore it is dominant ideologies that perpetuate the sex/gender binary in order to maintain power dynamics.

    I believe that if we started with discarding sex assignment at birth as a “regulatory practice” that “institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, where these are understood as expressive attributes of ‘male’ and ‘female’” then we could ultimately de-gender society and “true humanism” could be realised and instituted (Judith Butler). Being freed from these shackles of the sex/gender binary allows individuals to step into a personhood that is not regulated by hegemonic norms or socially prescribed ways of being and interaction.

    However, this immediate route to de-gendering is essentialist. We are still part of a world that has “norms” and ideals that are deeply interwoven into our social fabric. For example, the social construction of the female body and the normalisation of the male body has considered the female body as “the other”. This othering of the female body is based on anatomy and physiology and this othering also seeps into the subjugation of a feminine expression of gender. Femininity is still assumed to be debilitating. People with female bodies and whose gender expression is feminine are victims of oppression. Hence histories that reflects the need to implement equality constitutionally, institutionally and domestically.

    So before we can de-gender, I believe we need to de-cisgender first. There are and always have been and there still will be many more individuals who are non-binary, transgender and queer. Forget my privileged gender neutral experience, there are people who wake up every day compromising how they navigate their existence because of this idea that there are only two sexes and their manifestation should either be masculine or feminine depending on their body. I believe that once cisnormativity and its partner in crime, heteronormativity, are overthrown from our mindsets and understanding of bodies and sexuality, then surely the superiority of the male body and masculine expression would collapse?

    It is important to realise that the crux of our minor differences are what these dominant ideologies that perpetuate oppression are built on. It is about damn time that we interrogate this social construct and unlearn how we have been taught to prescribe ideas onto our bodies as well other people’s bodies.

    Only once the intricate hierarchies involved in our understanding of gender are undone then we can move into the dismantling phase of the entire construct: no body will be categorised and no personhood presumed in accordance. Essentially, people could simply be people.