Dangers lurk behind the canvas

CHENNAI: Rape is back in the news. But when hasn’t it? Sometimes the brutality warrants a headline or a breaking news slot. More often, it remains tucked away, jostling for space alongside reports of grand promises from the powers we have elected, or cropping up as a mere mention between advertisements on our screens. In 2022, 31,000 rape cases were reported in India. But that’s just a statistic. Most go unreported, unpunished, and indelibly etched from the memory of the survivor.

The world of art has always been a space to question injustice. Is it completely free of insults and violence against women? Is it a safe space for the women who have chosen it in various capacities?

Sexual abuse has always been rampant in the art world. Artemisia Gentileschi, the famous 17th-century Italian female painter, was raped at the age of 17 by her art teacher, Agostino Tassi. The trial that followed lasted seven months. She was forced to recount every gruesome detail and was even tortured with thumbscrews, a crude form of lie detector tests. Ultimately, her abuser was banished from Rome for five years—a sentence that was never carried out due to his close ties to powerful religious authorities. All the art she made afterward was her way of fighting back against the male violence she endured.

Has anything changed in the contemporary art world? Not much, actually. Abuse of power has cut across all eras and professions. Most cases of sexual harassment were open secrets that no one wanted to talk about. Every unequal power equation always carries the risk of using sex as a means of payment. The #MeToo movement that brought down big names in many industries also brought to light some of these stories of exploitation in the art world.

In India, the initiative is believed to have originated in 2017, when a retrospective exhibition of a prominent Indian artist in New York led to protests outside the venue after a female artist accused him of sexual assault.

This began a series of social media discussions until 2018 when women artists slowly started coming forward with allegations of abuse and harassment against key figures in the Indian art world. Towards the end of the year, a group of women artists created a petition to ensure the safety of those who had shared their horror stories, which was signed by a large number of fellow artists.

As the movement slowly becomes passive, not much has come of all these revelations. Although most organizations now have facilities to report cases of sexual abuse, it is still questionable whether only lip service is paid to the complaint. The continuing culture of silence of the society we live in must end. It is not enough to just hear these stories.

It is essential to condemn it and do something about it. The works of women artists should never be war cries of oppression of their brutally damaged lives. May we ever wake up to a safer world!