Art as Witness to Nepalese
Tragedy
By Stephanie L. Lim, Contributing Writer
They say a picture is worth a thousand words,
but when the picture tells a story of violence and victimhood
and when the artist herself had lived the picture, the word count
quickly approaches a million. In Art as Witness: Shattered Lives/Unshattered
Dreams," on display through March 30 at the Boston Public Library,
viewers get a first-hand glimpse of the horrific reality experienced
by hundreds of Nepalese women. It is a bittersweet story. Viewers
can expect to come out of the exhibit with conflicting emotions,
ranging from rage to despair to hope.
Organized by Myrna Balk,
a Boston artist and social worker, the show features drawings by
Nepalese women, as well as etchings and photographs by Balk that
chronicle her experiences in Nepal and the social issues she faced
during her time there. Balk had traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal, in
1998 to consult with a non-governmental organization about the
issue of domestic violence. She also taught at the School of Social
Work there, where she met and worked with women and girls living
in local shelters ”many
of them victims of domestic violence and forced prostitution in
India. All of the art in this show accomplishes what it sets out
to do” to
raise awareness of the plight of women in Nepal and tell the story
of shattered lives in a way that somehow strengthens the power
of their dreams.
The collection is unpretentious, intimate
and honest. The drawings and the stories told by
the accompaning captions are heartrending. The
women who drew them clearly wanted deeply to share their experiences.
Somehow, the knowledge that they had done the drawings themselves
gave the collection much more meaning and a sense of validity.
Many of them had never drawn before, according to an exhibition
flyer, but the urgency of their purpose helped them overcome their
self-consciousness. Their childlike compositions capture, with
wrenching irony, a stunning reality and a deeper wisdom.
Two conflicting
themes of the show were betrayal and empowerment. Many of the stories
behind the drawings involve women who were tricked by strangers
and kidnapped to India, where they became sex slaves. Some even
had husbands who did the unspeakable: turning over their
wives to the sex traffickers in exchange for money. Many were only
allowed to return to Nepal after they had contracted AIDS. Others
drawings reveal the terror of living with an abusive father.
Sabita,
age 13, submitted an impressively detailed drawing that captured
the sadness, pain and injustice of her situation. Done entirely
in ballpoint pen and green, pink, yellow and blue markers, it depicts
an infuriated father dragging a tearful mother to some unknown
and horrifying place. "My
father would beat my mother even more when she was pregnant,"
Sabita wrote. Balk's etchings are stark and
striking, reflecting the crudely innocent style of the women's
drawings. Her themes are also merciless in their truth and unrelenting
in their exposure of cruelty. There is "Send
Them Home to Die" done in etching, aquatint, and
softground, in which women with broken bodies walk single-file
down a hill, perhaps to death, perhaps to hell. But their lives
are already a sort of hell.
Laced throughout the exhibit, though,
amid the anguished cries for a better world, there is a strand
of hope. Seventeen-year-old Neera, for instance, drew a chain of
women joining hands and "organizing
to solve the different kinds of social problems."
But nowhere is this attitude more apparent than in Balk's
photographs of the women themselves. Balk completed the series
on a trip to the village of Kot Goan in the district of Gorkha.
Done in black and white prints, the photographs are intimate and
gripping, with a distinctly documentary feel that manages not to
alienate the viewer or the subject. The photographs reveal the
daily lives of grandmothers, young women, and little girls, all
retaining a kind of beauty or strength despite their weathered
surfaces. They are not disconsolate or even depressed, they
are thoughtful and surviving, many of them even smiling. One does
not feel pity for these women, but one feels their pain. As one
mother said, "I
am eager to go home now because now I understand that my daughter
is as valuable as my sons."
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