Artivism
Art meets activism at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
Aida Šehović, “ŠTO TE NEMA (Why are You Not Here?),” 2019
installation, detail of porcelain cups (courtesy Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg; photo by Aaron Cohen)
“Art has an ability to transform a victim into a survivor,” Bosnian artist Aida Šehović says in a film at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. The film, Conversations with Artivists, is part of the museum’s Artivism exhibition, on view until Jan. 16.
First presented at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Artivism is organized by the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, an international non-profit organization. This iteration brings together artists and art collectives from around the world whose work brings awareness to injustices – along with art contributed to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation inquiry into residential schools. While the stories and experiences are different, the artists are united in their desire to create change.
Šehović is one of thousands of Bosnian Muslims who fled Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992 during the civil war that followed Bosnia’s independence from Yugoslavia. She lived as a refugee in Turkey and Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1997.
Her work, ŠTO TE NEMA (Why are You Not Here?), relates to the killing of 8,372 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, during the civil war. She has been adding to it since 2006, the year the International Court of Justice heard the case, later ruling that genocide had occurred.
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Aida Šehović, “ŠTO TE NEMA (Why are You Not Here?),” 2019
installation, detail of porcelain cups (courtesy Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg; photo by Aaron Cohen)
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Aida Šehović, “ŠTO TE NEMA (Why are You Not Here?),” 2019
installation view at Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg (courtesy CMHR; photo by Aaron Cohen)
When her nomadic monument was first installed in a public square in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it included some 900 traditional Bosnian porcelain coffee cups. Since then, it has been installed internationally every year on July 11, the anniversary of the massacre. Currently, there are some 7,500 cups. Her goal is to have one cup per victim. In Winnipeg, the cups have been placed on tall racks in a U-shaped formation that allows visitors to immerse themselves in the middle of the installation, letting the sheer number of cups resonate.
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Rebin Chalak, “Masks of Yazidi Women,” 2014-2019
installation view at Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg (courtesy CMHR; photo by Aaron Cohen)
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Rebin Chalak, “Masks of Yazidi Women,” 2014-2019
installation view at Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg (courtesy CMHR; photo by Aaron Cohen)
Nearby, another installation uses a tall metal structure, this one a cage like those where Yazidi women and girls were once imprisoned. The Yazidis, a small ethnic religious group in Northern Iraq, were told to convert to Islam in 2014 or face death. Women and girls were abducted from their homes, kept in cages, and forced into marriage with members of ISIL, the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The whereabouts of thousands of Yazidi women and girls remains unknown.
Rebin Chalak, born in Iraqi Kurdistan, met with survivors and listened to their stories. To share their experiences with the world while protecting their anonymity, Chalak took plaster casts of their faces. Since the number of faces in his installation, Masks of Yazidi Women, is small compared to the number of women who were abducted, viewers can focus on individuals and their expressions of pain. By placing some masks outside the cage and some within it, Chalak underlines that while some women have been freed from sexual slavery, others are still missing.
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Grupo de Arte Callejero, “Carteles de la Memoria (Street Signs of Memory),” 1999
steel panels, installation view at Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg (courtesy CMHR; photo by Aaron Cohen)
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Elisabeth Ida Mulyani, “Oleh-oleh,” 2017
sculpture, detail of installation at Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg (courtesy CMHR; photo by Aaron Cohen)
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Intuthuko Embroidery Project, “Apartheid Embroidery Series,” 2010-2011
embroidery, installation view at Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg (courtesy CMHR; photo by Aaron Cohen)
Other international art projects include street signs made by the Grupo de Arte Callejero, an artist collective that works to hold perpetrators accountable for human rights violations during Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. Also featured is work by the Intuthuko Embroidery Project, which helps women tell stories about apartheid in South Africa, as well as two installations by Elisabeth Ida Mulyani, who commemorates people killed and exiled for alleged ties with communism under the Indonesian dictatorship that seized power in 1965. Oleh-oleh, for instance, consists of 13 cast gold ears, representing 13 activists kidnapped in the 1990s for speaking out against the regime.
Upon exiting the gallery, visitors are faced with a call to action challenging them to think about the injustices around them and ask: What actions can I take to be part of the solution? ■
Artivism at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights from April 30, 2021 to Jan. 16, 2022.
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Canadian Museum for Human Rights
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