Wrong is not my name
Art against gender violence
The exhibition Equivocada no es mi nombre [Wrong is not my name] is presented as an exhibition project close to such important dates as September 23, International Day against Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking in Persons, and November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, a date born from the feminist movement to commemorate the murder of the three Mirabal sisters in the Dominican Republic in 1960.
The UN General Assembly, in 1999, took up the demand, establishing the date as a milestone for the common cry against violence that is the main cause of death and disability among women.
The figures are alarming: one in three women has suffered physical or sexual violence; almost 750 million women and girls worldwide were married before the age of 18; 71% of victims of trafficking are women and girls, and three in four are used for sexual exploitation.
Equivocada no es mi nombre is a journey through the works of artists of national and international trajectory who have worked denouncing this violence through visual language, such as video, installation or performance...
Starting from the arts as a tool for transforming reality, this exhibition proposes these works as a reflection on artistic creation and feminist activism, something common to all those present, and raises new debates on the multiple manifestations of violence against women. All the participants are artists, as could not be otherwise, committed to a reality that, as António Guterres, UN Secretary General, points out, "until women and girls, who constitute half of humanity, live without fear, without violence and without daily insecurity, we will not be able to truly affirm that we live in a just and equitable world".
Many works are not in this exhibit: it would be impossible to cover the whole corpus of work that hundreds of artists have done for decades to denounce violence against women. The aim of this exhibition is to provide a broad overview of some of the many ways in which patriarchy attacks women just for being female. We continue to face harassment, violence, threats, complicit silences, disbelief in our reports of aggressions, having our word questioned... but we continue to respond, holding our ground. The artistic system has done the same, with great artists who have chosen to use their tool of expression, their work, as a place of denunciation, of awareness, of response to this constant violence.
As the philosopher Amelia Valcárcel[1]points out, "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link," pointing out that "women's freedom has not been achieved on a planetary scale”. To be born a woman today, in many places, still means facing a reality that, in the best of cases, implies lower pay than male peers, and in the worst of cases, rape, forced marriages, genital mutilation and so on.
Art and culture are spaces for reflection, for shared thought, for inquiry, for questioning the status quo. The art system is no stranger to the problems that affect societies and has demonstrated this for centuries, with artists and works that have aimed to raise new points of view in the face of human conflicts. Art that strives to be political and truly seeks to transform these unjust realities must, naturally, be feminist, because only an approach that is genuinely democratic will, consequently, be egalitarian.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQDM34iJIeM
Curated by: Semíramis González
Artists: Pilar Albarracín, Yolanda Domínguez, Sandra Paula Fernández, Ana Gallardo, Sukran Moral, Esther Pizarro, Martha Rosler, Amalia Ulman
Graphic design: Davinia V. Reina
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