Transmuting the fear of gender-based violence into a force for art.

 

We warmly welcome you into a collective poetic experience aiming to build a circle of empowerment and to produce beauty and courage from the experience of fear.

This workshop is organized in collaboration with HEKLER, as a part of their ANTI FEAR Assembly, an evolving collective practice aiming in this time of crisis and change for a space decidedly between cultural/theoretical dialogue and therapeutic discourse. It is envisioned as a space in which we bring privately held fears into community with others’ fears to embrace vulnerability and open collective experiments in community-building, trust, and reimagining the commons.

It is said that in the darkest extreme the potential for luminosity appears in exactly the same measure.  The purest black in nature contains the entire spectrum of colors, so it is simply a matter of revealing them. What seems to be only a dark area is, in reality, raw material filled with the potential to totally shine out and brighten our way.

Artists Mary Paz Cervera, Nadine Faraj and Sneha Krishnan will present their works sparked by the reality of gender-based violence and their individual ruminations on the meaning of corporal freedom, femininity, sisterhood, ritual and the collective experience of solidarity and empowerment.

 

 

Sneha Krishnan, Earthen Vessels, 2020

Sneha’s works are an expression of a space where  internal conflict and the external world integrate. Through this interaction, she hopes to unravel the different layers of human consciousness with a focus on the female lived experience.

 

 

 

 

 

Gender violence is one of the most prevailing human rights violation worldwide. This installation proposes a deep awareness at an individual and collective level about this issue, through the symbolic representation of personal spaces with a sacred connotation. This circumstance allows us to recognize ourselves as sisterhood, generating spaces of solidarity for protection.

 

 

 

 

Nadine Faraj, Ages Ago Every Cell In Your Soul Capsized Forever Into This Infinite Golden Sea

 

Since the dawn of the Abrahamic religions women have been pushed to the back of the temple, literally and figuratively. What mystic practices they wanted, they have had to cultivate and maintain themselves. Faraj has been painting mystic erotic imagery for years, however, with this project, she now reveals her link to the ancient Babylonian sisterhood teachings. “Our secret cave was painted by women, for women’s education and ceremonies. My great-aunt Violette as well as my aunts Valentine and Grace were all initiates in this pre-Abrahamic tradition.”

 

 

 

HEKLER is an artist-run platform and transnational community of artists, cultural workers, and activists that fosters the critical examination of hospitality and conflict through collaborative programming, education, residencies, and archiving.

The ANT Project was born from the need to create a horizontal structure of interaction among artists, curators, writers, and performers. It facilitates interconnection between seemingly disparate individual practices, nurturing the creative process of the community as a whole.

Its mission is inspired by the interaction of ants in an ant colony where individuals, performing their own role, interact with the larger whole in order to feed the colony. The achievements realized collectively would be impossible for a single member on its own.

 

 

 

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