Thursday, November 5, 2015

Witch-hunts


Lately, I've been preoccupied with the story of women accused of sorcery in Papua New Guinea. An article in the Huffington Post last week detailed how women were being tortured and killed by their villages for suspected sorcery. The writer, who met with local women activists trying to combat this practice, also described the socio-economic backgrounds that lead to the culture of witch-hunting.

Photo by Vlad Sokhin from Huffington Post 
The image of this woman being publicly tortured by the mob lingered in my mind, along with another image of a woman being burnt alive. It's something that does not leave your memory - the jarring depiction of modernity juxtaposed against ancient belief systems and gender inequality. For me, this is something I feel I must address in my work somehow, because it is relevant not just in the far corner of Papua New Guinea, but also relevant to our everyday interactions as people with one another.

Violence against women is of historical nature. Throughout time, women's bodies have been traded, used, pillaged, and oppressed by various agencies. Women have only just started to be defined by something other than their bodies in this century, but the road to equality is hard and steep. Often, women are targeted because they have weaker status in society and make easier targets for those who want to confiscate their property. Other times, the witch hunt is simply an explosion of communal anxiety that manifests itself in scapegoating misfortunes on those who are either more prosperous, or who have weaker social political ties.

The phenomenon of the witch-hunt is an interesting one, in that it is present across many different cultures, and also manifests itself in times of social turmoil, when misfortunes are unexplained. It's interesting how the community vents its anger and fear through the purging of one of its own. The innocent victim bears the brunt of their fury, their bodies beaten and broken by the mob's intense anger. To the witch-hunters, they are simply cleansing their community of unwanted pestilence. The burning of witches a symbol of purification.



What I want to explore is the concept of the female body within this context of social pressures. It's interesting to me how the female body is both a symbol of desire and fear. On one hand, the female body is celebrated in western culture, with mass media's constant barrage of the ideal feminine beauty from every lifestyle magazine and ad. On the other hand, the female body is feared and controlled by mass culture in the form of slut shaming, sexual violence, and body image propaganda. In the case of the witch hunts in Papua New Guinea (surprisingly similar to the witch hunts in Salem), the female body epitomizes the evil that cannot be understood, and that which becomes the embodiment of communal fears, and outlet for growing frustrations.

I sometimes wish I could be liberated from my body, and be a formless entity defined only by my mind. This is, of course, impossible. But I feel that I must somehow convey this sense of frustration and injustice through my work, to expand the definition of the female body beyond the usual fine art motif of the reclining nude, a bourgeois fantasy of feminine ennui. Hopefully, these ideas will find their way out of my mind and become paintings. In the mean time, the research about witch craft and gender based violence is gearing me toward future work and providing me with some direction.

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