Bubblegum Club

Tag: oppression against women

  • Filmmakers Mtengenya and Mkhabela collaborate to turn words into gentle visual poetry

    Filmmakers Mtengenya and Mkhabela collaborate to turn words into gentle visual poetry

    “Let us roam with the stars, because they dance around us” this is the start to Nefro Poetess – Episode 1; Guide Me Home. Nefro Poetess is a three-part web-series by filmmaker Amahle Mtengenya and poet Fezeka Mkhabela (starring Bongani Zulu) —the pair makes use of narrative film to create a vision and bring forth an authentic voice to issues of love, loss, pain and redemption, in a way that is complex. Piece by piece the story unfolds —with Mkhabela’s voice tracking the journey.

    Across the world, women not only face oppression but have become the face of that oppression, Nefro Poetess takes this notion, twists and turns it until it is limp. With a strong woman lead, it reaches deep inside and taps into personal feelings and a state of being —combining the art of filmmaking and spoken poetry into a single language.

    “Poetry is becoming obsolete in the digital age. With this series, we wanted to bring our imagination around poetry to the screen. Creating an awareness around this language” explains Mtengenya.

    Roses, soft pallets, face-painting and ethereal, suspenseful music grace the screen ushering in new voices through independent storytelling. The slight changes in gradient influence the elements that make Nefro Poetess a powerful piece, it is multivalent and highly emotive. An oral and visual experience transporting the viewer into a tense reality.

    Mtengenya and Mkhabela are film students at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) and Zulu studies architecture at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT). The work was born following a film-school research project and a strong friendship between the three —anchored by a deep desire to “create things that people can relate to”. They hope to expand on the ideas of visual poetry and online cinema by extending the web-series. Their shared objective is to use these mediums to tell more authentic, personal stories.

    This beautiful treasure box of a web-series persuades, informs and connects through its slow pace and relatable nature. Part one; ‘Guide Me Home’ is a poem about love; the second part; ‘Painkiller’ expresses pain and loss, while the third; ‘Third Eye Queen’ is redemptive. “Live in truth because you know a black queen never truly dies” – hails Mkhabela…… a resurrection.

    Through this project, language becomes its own topography used to create a space for reflection. Beauty, fragility and authenticity combine to create an indispensable memory.

  • Love is a Difficult Blue // Cathartic Moments in Collaborative Practice with Ghada Amer & Reza Farkhondeh

    Washes of colour bleed into pools of pleasure. Delicately drawn and intricately articulated. Forms of flesh emerge from thread. The intersection of love and lust. Interjected by a moment of escape from a solitary echo-chamber. Lured by siren call of paint and brush – lifting the veil of separation. Transitioning from viewer to maker. Transgressing from one space to another. Liberation from the binding constructs of one’s own perception, into another dimension.

    The moment Reza Farkhondeh put paint to one of Ghada Amer’s canvases he experienced a cathartic release. An instant free from his own practice. At the time she was away traveling,on seeing what he had done, she was initially shocked and upset. However, over time she warmed to the collective piece. Reza described the experience as “a meeting of two minds…You can create and also watch – you are a part of it, but also not.” The dynamic tension between presence and separation is integral to their collaborative practice.

    Since the early 2000’s they have explored a relationship founded on trust and reciprocity. While working out of their studio in Harlemthey still maintain individual identities and autonomy while engaging in collaborative space. Navigating this can at times be challenging. However, overtime Ghada and Reza have carved tools to combat conflict. Combined authorship is at the crux of their decision-making process. The two artists flip a coin to see who will place their signature above the other’s and hold a secret ballot to decide which of the works are finished. If the outcome does not reveal two affirmative votes, then the piece is further worked into. These democratic systems are used as effective tools to avoid potential moments of tension and ensure a fair trade.

    Their current show, Love is a Difficult Blue opened at Goodman’s Cape Town Gallery on the 18th of January and runs through to the 24th of February.The work explores notions of women and nature as both bearers of life – captured within an industrial patriarchal system of exploitation and oppression. Ghada enlists the female form as an archetypal icon – constructed from an amalgam of images. She uses these bodies, charged with notions of desire, to subvert stereotypes created by the white western male gaze. Intentionally provocative, the figures act as catalysts for conversation around the conventions of art.

    Her use of thread and embroidery stemmed from a frustration around not having access to the ‘man’s world’ of painting. In an interview with Brett Littman she recalled that in 1991 she decided that, “in order for me to paint, I would need to come up with my own technique – which was using the traditional women’s technique of sewing.” Reza describes the forms as “mechanical woman” – rooted in reproduction and systematically flattened through the process of embroidery. This connects to the historical erasure of women and female artists in the western cannon – something Ghada experienced in the curriculum while studying at École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts à la Villa Arson in France.

    This art school also happened to be the site at which they met, in 1988. At the time, Reza was completing a MFA in video and short film. Prior to his engagement with images of the natural world, he worked on a series called Made in China. The series of oil paintings depicted objects that appeared in Dollar Stores – all worth 99 cents. This was followed by a depressive episode – one which was broken by the conceptual freedom of working with landscapes and the catharsis of collaboration. “I guess what broke me out of this self-doubting period was when I painted on Ghada’s canvas in 2000.”

    The two have unified their practice through a process of exchange.  Ghada and Reza both begin in their mark-making working independently on individual canvases, once content, this is followed by exchange for the other to imprint upon. Reza remarked on the moments of voyeurism the shared studio enables – allowing brief windows into each other’s work and process. The pair however, are very careful not to disrupt the other’s practice in those early tentative moments – providing space for the work to evolve quietly.

    Initially their collaboration was established purely as a visual juxtaposition of medium and style. However, this organically grew into integrated layers – with each artist playfully trespassing into the other’s domain. These moments of slippage occur when Reza traces the female form and Ghada raises her brush to his botanical subjects.

    It is in collaboration that the nature of art is revealed  – Steve Lacy

  • Stacey Gillian Abe // using glass as a medium for dialogue about the oppression of women

    Ugandan artist Stacey Gillian Abe uses glass as her primary medium to construct sculptures that reflect on the objectification of women in Uganda. “I love shiny things, that’s why I work with glass. What’s more I relate to the dual personalities of glass: liquid and hard. As a young Ugandan woman I am also both fragile and hard at the same time,” she states in an interview with IAM Magazine.

    At the pop-up exhibition (Re)Thinking Feminism & Black Womanhood that formed part of the Kampala Art Biennale 2016, Abe engaged with this central issue directly through chocolate as a medium. When asked about her work she expressed that, “I want to confront people with how men look at women in our society, because it’s a taboo subject here. First they look at our bodies, as if we are just candy for consumption.” Abe created vaginas in different shapes, forms and colours and presented them as chocolates, served on a dish at a set table as a way to emphasize that “All women are unique”. But this work also speaks to how women have been treated as objects of desire and consumption.

    Her glass work continues this gesture towards highlighting how women are treated, as well as attempts to direct viewers to a more empowering and holistic attitude towards women. An example of this was a site-specific glass installation titled Strange Fruit Konyagi that she produced while at a residency in Tanzania. Through the use of Konyagi [a spirit produced in Tanzania] bottles hung in clusters in the shape of the Tanzanian Neem tree, she aimed to present a woman as a “nurturer and giver of life”. The significance of the bottles, Abe explains, is “from a more traditional African point of view. Bottles also signify conjuring and capturing spiritual entities. You can see the bottles hanging from the Neem tree as holding the answer to what lies beyond the known world.” This work reflected on the difficulties women can face when being forced to find a balance between traditional and modern understandings of what it means to be a women, while searching for their own definition of womanhood.

    Strange Fruit Konyagi

    Due to the fact that most of her works are displayed in public spaces, this forces both men and women to be confronted by gender misconceptions and the oppression of women in her community.

    Check out Abe’s website to look through more of her work.