CHENNAI: Rape is in the news again. But then, when has it not been? Sometimes, the brutality warrants a newspaper headline or a breaking news slot. Most times, they remain tucked away, jostling for space along with reports on grand promises by the powers we have elected or surface as a mere mention in between commercials on our screens. In 2022, 31,000 rape cases were reported in India. But then, that is just a statistic. Most of them go unreported, unpunished and remain unerasable from the survivor’s mind.
The world of art has always been a space to question injustices. So, is it then completely free from offenses and violence against women? Is it a safe space for the women who have chosen it in varied capacities?
Sexualised abuse of power has always been rampant in the art world. Artemisia Gentileschi, the famous 17th century female Italian painter, was raped by her art tutor, Agostino Tassi, at the age of 17. The trial that followed lasted seven months. She was made to recount every gruesome detail and even tortured with thumbscrews, which was a primitive form of a lie detector test. Eventually, her perpetrator was banished from Rome for five years — a sentence which was never carried out given his close proximity to powerful religious authorities. All the art she created thereafter was her way of fighting back against the male violence she suffered.
Has anything changed in the art world of contemporary times? Not much, actually. Abusing power has traversed time and professions. Most instances of sexual harassment have been open secrets, with none willing to talk about it. Any unequal power equation always carries the risk of the use of sex as a currency. The #MeToo Movement that brought down big names in many industries, did bring out some of these tales of exploitation in the art world too.
In India, it is considered to have been initiated in 2017, when a senior Indian artist’s retrospective exhibition in New York led to protests outside the venue, after a female artist accused him of sexual assault.
This started off a thread of discussions on social media until women artists slowly started coming out into the open in 2018 with allegations of abuse and harassment against important figures in the Indian art world. By the end of the year, a group of women art practitioners drafted a petition to ensure the safety of those who had recounted their tales of horror. This was signed by a multitude of fellow artists.
With the movement slowly becoming a passive one, nothing much has come out of all these revelations. Although most organisations now have provisions to report cases of sexual abuse, it is a still a question if only lip service would be paid to the complaint. The continued culture of silence from the society we live in must end. It isn’t enough to merely hear these stories.
It is essential to condemn and to do something about it. The works of female artists must never be war cries of oppression from their brutally damaged lives. May we wake up someday to a safer world!