Describing herself as a visual artist who uses photography as her chosen medium, Gowun Lee explores social issues in a conceptual manner. She received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, and her work has been included in exhibitions around the world, the most recent being the 2018 Aperture Summer Open titled The Way We Live Now in New York.
Lee has moved from New York to South Korea for her ongoing project which brings light to the fact that the majority of LGBTQ people in South Korea have to hide their true identities, despite the increase in LGBTQ activism and awareness. This is represented visually in her series I’m Here With You, where the people photographed never face the camera directly. Instead their bodies are turned and their faces are hidden. “The LGBTQ individuals photographed – all facing away from the camera – remind us of how Korean society continues to neglect and refuse to accept them. “By creating these images, my intent is to both implicate the viewer in the nation’s larger refusal to acknowledge the identity of LGBTQ individuals and, more importantly, to spur us all to take action and change this attitude once and for all,” Lee says in an interview with the UK’s Daily Mail. This series is a powerful portrayal of lived experiences, and the way in which this affects people’s lives, with those photographed often alone within the frame. A creepy stillness becomes apparent with Lee’s compositional choices.
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
