The Indypendent, NY
March 17 2007

Fighting Rape With Art

By Anoush Ter Taulian (Zaum)
>From the March 16, 2007 issue

Anoush Ter Taulian’s `Arising From The Circle Womb Of Life’

Women of Color Art Exhibit on Violence Against Women at the Brecht
Forum,
451 West St., between Bank and Bethune. The exhibit runs until March
31.

When I was in Kenya a man flung me into a ditch and lay on top of me
to rape me. When I started screaming, he pulled a machete out from
the back of his shirt and said, `Be quiet or I will kill you.’

I continued to scream and he ran away. I made a Stop Rape poster in
Swahili and English of a woman kicking her attacker, armed with a
knife, in the balls. A policeman who said my poster was
antigovernment arrested me. I spent a night in jail for my poster.

Most of my artistic work deals with violence. I have co-produced with
Fred Nyugen an audio CD called The Cost of Genocide – Armenia 1915.
Most of the Armenian women in the deportation caravans were raped by
the Turks but they are ashamed to talk about it. I spent nine years
as a volunteer in the Artsakh (the part of Armenia that was attacked
by Azerbaijan) liberation army and videotaped Armenian hostages and
torture victims.

I feel an important part of ending wars is ending the patriarchies
that disrespect women and are destroying Mother Earth. I believe,
during the matriarchy 5,000 years ago, when people didn’t know it
took sperm to have children, women were worshipped as life givers and
there was no private property. I feel indigenous women and all women
of color have a deep matriarchal artistic memory from which we can
get knowledge of how to overturn the patriarchy. So I decided to have
a women of color art exhibit that brought together African, Asian,
Pacific Islander, Latina, Caribbean, Native American and Near and
Middle Eastern women creating medicine art to help heal violence
against women. Most of the women in this exhibit had never created
work dealing with violence against women and produced original works
for the show.

All of our cultures have experienced imperialistic attacks so
devastating that it has been hard and often taboo to address the
violence against women in our own cultures. The Western world wants
us to believe the Third World is more barbaric toward women,
notwithstanding Christian witch hunts and the 25 percent of young
American girls who have been victims of incest. The male art world
generally ignores the problem of violence against women and the
feminist art movement is white controlled and sometimes racist,
despite some highprofile shows like `Global Feminisms’ currently at
Brooklyn Museum.

It is time for women of color to regain their matriarchal power to
end male privilege and the rape, beating, mutilation and murder of
women for merely being women.

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