Menstruation, good and evil at the 2022 Burrowes Students' exhibition

 

 Menstruation

The smell is strong, all over. Smell which I associate with some menstruating women. The smell comes through the mask. There are no women near me. I had run through the rain, so breathing is a bit heavy. Is it the petrichor? Place was hot before. Is the earth menstruating?

Atashscia Bovell's work is about womanhood. For one wild moment I wonder if the installation includes some kind of device to produce the scent. The smell though, does not come  here.

One of the pieces features the padding from the menstrual pads, red blood and screws. The softness contrasting with the pain. I have witnessed, helplessly, the pain. And the shaming. Navratra is coming up , worship of the divine Mother while many people will mutter about 'unclean' women.

Period poverty and the shaming of menstruating women are forms of gender based violence. 

There is no imposition of motherhood as the essence of womanhood here. There are representations of vaginas. 

Navratra on my mind as I look at the picture of a goddess, with the Guyana flag seeming to flow from her reproductive organs. Thinking of Mahsa Amini in Iran, dead because men want to cover up women. And the women in Guyana, dead because the 'poor disturbed men who need help' tripped out and killed them . 

And the artist here asserting the existence of what is seen as a threat to so many people.

Good and evil

Turn the corner and there is the tall graceful figure with red sequined head , long black gown , gloves.. connected in red to a large picture frame. Red as blood again, though not menstrual blood.

"I am the artist" Roberto Teekah says. I am glad to gaff with an artist though not sure what to say. There is a story in the three paintings - revelation, divulgence, severance. There are no pupils (eyes rolled up to show inner reflection as per Voodoo tradition).

Roberto explains that this piece shows that good and evil are not separate, that one cannot exist without the other. 

I take pictures. The camera falls down after I leave the exhibition so I write from memory, and with apologies for what I have forgotten in the names and titles of other striking work.

Thinking about good and evil as Guyana does oil. Good for many , evil for the earth

 Yonella Archibald is from Linden and her work features Linden. There is a large striking piece depicting a bauxite plant. Bauxite extraction which has given money to many. The piece is made with different fabrics. The smoke is what seems to be soft mosquito netting. 

There is something ironic here, how the soft fabrics are used here to beautifully present what has been damaging and dangerous.  I don't know if the artist intended this kind of irony or to make any political statements about the environment

Extractive industries have damaged the planet while making 'good products'. 

Good and evil, connected in Guyana.

Carnival

Roberto Teekah has another piece - an idyllic painting of a koker surrounded by black bits and pieces of rubbish. The kokers of Guyana, vital to our drainage,  which are clogged with rubbish.   A Caucausian woman in a carnival costume with a big grin subdues a woman who might be Indigenous, one hand around the next, the other hand holding the hair as though to take it. An angry painting which Roberto explains was how he felt when one year the 'imported Carnival' was displacing Mashramani.

The painting resonates though, all of colonialism, the taking and appropriation, the erasure of the Indigenous in different ways. 

Watching this painting at a time of  'Cricket Carnival' .

One Indigenous artist used leather. There is a painting "Shaman" and I think of the recent discussions of how Christianity mostly has spoken against Indigenous religious and traditional practices. 

I feel like touching some of the pieces, but I don't. I take the camera to get pictures of the things I would like to touch. Like the embroidered moss on the concrete, and the twisted dream catcher and the gilt frame of one of the paintings.

The smell I associate with menstruation is still there after the rain has gone. There were more images on the camera than those I have written about.  

But not everything has to be 'captured'.

(This is not a review)