Slave Lodge exhibitions showcase gender power concerns

VISUAL conversations about masculinity and gender-based violence in three exhibitions at the Iziko Slave Lodge opened this week, interfacing various perspectives of the problem.

The city centre’s Slave Lodge, at some point allegedly used as a brothel, has often hosted exhibitions about social challenges. These exhibitions carry on with the museum’s agenda of shifting “from human wrongs to human rights”.

I Am What I Am, Places, Faces, and Spaces, one of the three exhibitions, is curated by the local sex workers’ rights lobby group, Sweat.

Iziko’s social history curator Lynn Abrahams said this exhibition was linked to the lodge’s perceived flesh trade history. “It’s opening up a conversation on multiple levels: on power relations between masters and slaves at that time, the link between our history and heritage that is intertwined with slavery, and power relations,” she said.

The exhibition is also about the insertion of “outcasts and marginalised bodies” into spaces of institutional memory, added Abrahams.

A series of photographs “allow visitors a very empowering look at the intimacy of the day-to-day lives of sex workers through their own lens and frame”.

A second exhibition, Enough is Enough, curated by the 1000 Women Trust, “aims to create awareness of the seriousness of domestic and sexual violence against women, youth and our children”.

And then there is Still Figuring out What It Is to Be a Man, curated by Italian writer Antonia Porter and featuring photographs by her compatriot, Giovanna del Sarto.

Porter said their work was a “response to the increased gender and sexual- based violence against vulnerable groups… it zooms in on masculinity and how men respond to the escalation of gender-based and sexual violence against women and children”.

“In figuring out what it means to be a man, these men question whether masculinity is in crisis,” she added.

“The project explores the experiences of six young, middle-class, metropolitan South African men, and how such men see themselves today.

“Taking an empathetic view of individual men, but a critical one of patriarchy, Still Figuring out considers various aspects of manhood and masculinity in contemporary South Africa.”

The featured men are from a range of cultural and racial backgrounds, sharing broadly middle-class upbringings and familiarity with the urban professional world of South Africa – “a group that, more than any other, society seeks to please”, according to Porter.

“From creative and social entrepreneurs to film- makers to conflict journalists- turned-eco-farmers, these men reflect on their masculinities, contemplating various influences on their sense of manhood, and what they learned about becoming men from those who raised them,” Porter said.

“Through visual and audio snapshots of their lives, this multimedia project promotes the positive, courageous, and impressive qualities of the individual men involved; including their vulnerabilities.

“Many of these attributes fall outside of the traits usually associated with manhood and masculinity.

“Their stories also express some of the pressures and costs exerted on men by mainstream masculinities and patriarchy.”

The three exhibitions will run at the Iziko Slave Lodge on Wale Street in the city centre for the next six months.

A visitor takes in the latest exhibition at Iziko Slave Lodge.