In Honour Of Intrusive Women

Elisia Nghidishange disappears behind a door astride a plaster-of-Paris crowd at the national art gallery. You can’t see her at first as she reads the one-line reviews in the gallery guest book so, for a moment, you are alone.

But only in a manner of speaking.

In ‘The Insight of Intrusive Women’, involving metal, plaster and material manipulated to form skirts and stitched mouths, Nghidishange has built a community; a collection of women who have been silenced, moulded and violated by men-led societies characterised by sculptural eyes staring blindly down.

“They are looking down, because I feel men are looking down on us and we as women are always looking up at them. We always praise them, our gods,” Nghidishange scoffs.

This idea echoes through a large male head in which Nghidishange has placed several mask-like faces of women.

She calls the piece ‘Their minds are not our arrest’ and pushes back against the notion that the assigned roles, fantasies and whims born in the minds of men should be a women’s prison.

“They want to make their minds our destiny. They believe we should just listen to them and follow what they are saying. But women have their own feelings. We want to say what we want to say.”

Though women clearly have thoughts, desires and ambitions of our own, Nghidishange sews our plaster mirror mouths shut in a series titled ‘Shuttered’. In ‘The Insight of Intrusive Women’, as in life, women are routinely silenced through conditioning and cowed by the threat of violence or of being outcast.

“When we talk about women and men, to be honest, men are violent,” says Nghidishange. “Some men do this in public but some do it secretly. A woman can be suffering on the inside because somebody has told her: ‘You can’t divorce me. If you do it … you see that gun? I will kill you.’”

Speaking as witness to these experiences, Nghidishange uses her art as a tool to convey the insights and the commentary of the intrusive woman – a woman who disturbs, annoys and causes discomfort amid the patriarchal status quo and who will stand up and speak out.

“I have witnessed violent men and silenced women and it drives me to do an exhibition like this,” she says of her art, which is also her activism.

Part of her exhibition is ‘Gentle’, a lone male figure who honours the individuals working towards a more equal society amid a system designed to control women at the hands of men.

“We always say men are not good, but there are some gentlemen,” Nghidishange concedes.

“I tried to create a community. When you are viewing the exhibition, you must feel that community, be in that community and then find your position,” she says.

“When somebody is silencing you, you feel alone, but I want women to feel like they are part of these people, you are part of us. Women are powerful. We mustn’t believe what they are telling us, that we are weak, because we are not.”

‘The Insight of Intrusive Women’ will be on display at the National Art Gallery of Namibia until 18 July.

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