|
|
|
90 days
Testimony and its Possibilities
November 14-December 01, 2009
Slought Foundation
Reception on Saturday, November 14, 2009
Exhibition Openings Series
|
|
|
Over the course of 90 days in 1994, at least half a million minority Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu were killed by fellow Rwandans with the implicit permission of a passive international community. Voices of Rwanda films testimonies of Rwandans who lived through the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Through oral history, Voices of Rwanda attempts to create a space for the witness to share his or her life story, and by bringing these stories to a wider public, the listener ultimately becomes another witness to history. Click here to watch a short segment from Claudine’s and Adele’s testimonies
Claudine and Adele are two individuals that are also the subject of paintings by Natalie Frank, who visited Rwanda to embark on a collaborative project with Voices of Rwanda. Frank visited several of the women who had shared their testimonies with Voices of Rwanda and photographed each individual as a reference for the portraits. The collaboration between a figurative painter, an oral history project, and survivors themselves raises questions about how history, and more specifically the complexity of human atrocities and genocide, are represented by outsiders and communicated to the world. Frank’s portraits stand alone as individual works, yet when viewed in conjunction with segments of actual testimonies, one is reminded of the limitations of each form and the perspectives we bring to them.
Rwanda is a country with a rich tradition of oral history. One less acknowledged consequence of the Rwandan genocide is the rupture of that tradition. The reasons for this phenomenon are many, among them a destroyed trust within communities, which at times destroyed the very idea of community itself, and the difficulty of asserting one’s personal narrative as the nation attempts to redefine its global image.
This oral history project thus opens up a space in Rwanda for survivors to talk about their own experiences, one that enables them to create a second space with their words. It also attempts to instantiate this space on the level of the archive, one that implicates viewers across space and time. However, there is a tension here between our aspirations for the power of testimony and art to contribute to genocide prevention, and what these responses ultimately enact. Another tension concerns the impossibility of communicating and portraying a survivor’s experience. This exhibition acknowledges these limitations, yet still attempts to provide a lens for us to listen and see.
For more information about Voices of Rwanda, please visit www.voicesofrwanda.org
This program was made possible in part through the generous sponsorship of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Society of Friends of the Slought Foundation.
MLA Style:
Testimony and its Possibilities. "90 days." Slought Foundation Online Content. [14 November 2009;
Accessed 18 March 2010]. <http://slought.org/content/11437/>.
|
|
