When Dusk Falls, an unflinching exploration of the medical and sexual collective trauma housed by the female body, promises to confront and lay bare a culture of violence against women.
Featuring the work of portrait artists Tonia Nneji and Jamie Luoto, the exhibition raises uncomfortable questions around the relationship between vulnerability and resilience, the culture of shame and dismissal surrounding women’s collective trauma, and the endurance of the psyche. Does this exhibition provide new insight into trauma and the female experience? Or does it simply hold up a mirror to society’s treatment of women? Do we dare look away?
Jamie Luoto
San Francisco’s Jamie Luoto explores the lasting psychological impact of living with a body which has endured sexual assault via a series of intimate self-portraits and still lifes. Through this vulnerable act, Luoto investigates the relationship between complex post-traumatic stress disorder and the body, whilst simultaneously reclaiming agency over her own experience as a survivor.
The composition of these pieces places the female form, either figuratively or metaphorically, centre stage with dark, often phallic, male presences lurking just out of view. These paintings forefront the victim in the way that most mainstream media outlets focus on the perpetrator. The victim is not shamed, their experience is not dismissed, and their credibility is not interrogated; the focus of these pieces is not on the act of violence itself but its profound and unrelenting impact.
In some pieces, the figure is positioned nude and vulnerable, almost willing the viewer to sexualise them, if not for the perverse undercurrent of occult-like symbolism which permeates the mood of each piece: a porcelain cat overlooks the ‘ghosts’ of men represented by swathes of condoms, a woman kneels on all fours to lap at spilled milk, half-eaten apples scatter across a ruffled bed sheet. Such rich visual language is suggestive of the bilateral relationship between the victim and the world around them: does Luoto interpret the presence of sexual assault in everything due to her trauma, or does she in fact lay bare the culture which enabled her sexual assault in the first place?
Tonia Nneji
Diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) in 2014 at the age of 22, Tonia Nneji’s work explores the impact of medical violence against women. This collection of paintings takes a step away from the Nigerian artist’s signature blue-toned and featureless figures which represent the invisibility and often overlooked nature of women’s pain. The figures presented in When Dusk Falls unabashedly meet the viewer’s gaze with a pained yet composed expression which inspires not sympathy but admiration.
The subjects themselves are clad in Ankara (Dutch wax print cloth) wrappers as an homage to the artist’s mother’s sacrifice when she had to sell her most prized wrappers to pay her daughter’s medical bills. As the artist herself states, ‘when I have my episodes, I am completely naked. It is my mother who covers me with fabric.’ Combined with their importance to everyday Igbo life, these textiles act as a reminder of the impact of generational and colonial trauma on the social justification of medical violence against women of colour.
When Dusk Falls confronts the viewer with a rawness of existence rarely seen elsewhere. As Nneji states: ‘I really bare it all. I don’t believe in hiding anything.’ This collection of paintings forces into the light a topic usually shrouded in a culture of shame and taboo and asks questions surrounding societal propagation of violence against women.
Clothed or nude, the vulnerability of these figures promises to bring the once private and shameful into the public sphere and unveil a collective pain endured by women across space and time. This exhibition posits the female body not only as a site of trauma but also of endurance and persistence. When Dusk Falls vows to explore dark and uncomfortable corners of the human psyche and question the relationship between trauma, shame, and the female body.
Jamie Luoto & Tonia Nneji: When Dusk Falls
18 July – 31 August 2024
Jamie Luoto & Tonia Nneji | 18 July – 31 August 2024 – Overview | Kristin Hjellegjerde
Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin. Germany.
Esther Lundgren is a London-based freelance writer and Comparative Literature graduate. Her particular interests lie in postcolonialism and the arts as a means of amplifying underrepresented voices.
