Videos

Hate crime video
Raped and killed for being a lesbian: South Africa ignores 'corrective' attacks
• Women living in fear of brutal assaults by male gangs
• Country's 'macho politics' lead to lack of action
source: guardian.co.uk
date: 12 March 12, 2009


Own videos
Isangoma: Urban Shaman (2008)
duration: 9.40min

Isangoma is a documentary that tells the story of a Toronto woman who is practicing traditional African medicine in an urban setting. Sibongile Nene, is of African decent and is a progressive Sangoma. She deals with the bridges that must be crossed when Western medical practices meets traditional healing.

what...?
duration: 4:12

DVD
Video installation (2008)

* What don't you see when you look at me is a video installation that examines the act of Western looking/gazing, of seeing, of perception, and ultimately of mapping. It asks what registers and is imagined in a viewer's mind when glancing at a black female body “against” a white background. There is, as Sherene Razack (2002) argues, an important relationship between space and identity, and in Western/Europeanized and globalized spaces, there is still a problematic issue of space/location and how that black female body is positioned either at the public gallery or in private spaces. The textured or coloured body has a way of constraining the viewer/the gazer, resulting in the reproduction of prejudice, marginalization, and denial of the diversity of the black female body. For instance, there are still misconceptions about black bodies and the desire that runs through them, as we are often perceived as hypersexual, heterosexual, infected, and diseased.

In this video I used my being as self-referent to my own body which inhabits ‘white' space.
Symbols such as feathers, a black tyre, a sausage, and a white background are used to represent not only living objects or human organs, but also the relationship between the self as being and the physical world. Representation of each object is metaphoric in its detail, for example, feathers represents a dark forest/pubic hair. A black tyre represents a safe haven/ womb or a place of belonging. A sausage can be perceived as a phallus but at the same time represents what is inside the womb or intestines, and which can cause the confusion and struggle that comes with the agitation and emotions provoked by interference. A white background is the user/specter who always believes that s/he can appropriate anything/anybody as means of exploration/exploring.

The visuals are accompanied by different sounds and my own voice reciting the poem “I ache for you” by Yvonne Onakeme Etaghene (2004). The aesthetics of sexuality and desire are interrogated, as is the focus on (hetero) gendered understandings of maternity, fertility, motherhood, femininity, African womanhood, longing, lust, and (lack of) passion to which (some) women's identities are always subjected.

My performance is a way of returning the gaze, as I am looking out from the ‘white' space my body inhabits, and by which it is surrounded. I look away from it, but the viewer will always see my subjectivity: a black, naked, female body “against” and in opposition to “whiteness.” Due to centuries of European exploitation and oppression, black women were never allowed, taught, or socialized to capture their own (positive) images or explore their own sexual and erotic freedom, and to look back, stare back.

The title is taken from a collection/series of photographs in my publication Only half the Picture (Muholi, 2006). My approach to the question of body politics in the video is inspired by readings in Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution, focusing on the work of performance artists like Sacred Naked Nature Girls (SNNG), Berni Searle (SA), Tracy Rose (SA), Carolee Schneeman (Canada) and many female artists of the 1970s-present, who used radical performing arts to deal with issues of inequity and social justice. Most used their own bodies to express their concerns and issues.

REFERENCES

Sherene H. Razack, "When Place Becomes Race", in Razack, ed., __Race  Space and the Law Unmapping a White Settler Society__Between the Lines Press:  Toronto , 2002, p.5.

* NB: Part of What...? was presented at the Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body, Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, and other venues in the US in 2008