Mexico has seen some pretty wacky museum installations lately. Tuesday, the Discovery Channel announced that The Museo Subacuático de Arte de Cancún built an underwater sculpture garden that doubles as an artificial reef. And from now until Nov. 17, you can witness the plights of women worldwide at the Museo Universitario del Chopo in an exhibit called “Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art.”
While the subject matter is anything but wacky, some of the art installations border on the bizarre. Lise Bjorne Linnert from Norway created a series of rayographs, in which her breath is captured on light sensitive paper. We think Linnert had a deeper meaning here than simply showing the mouth equivalent of taking a black light inside a hotel room, probably something about women screaming but no one hearing them.
And then there are those works that just reach out and tug on your heartstrings. Patricia Evans was sexually assaulted while jogging on Chicago‘s lakefront in 1988. She recreated the scene in a series of chilling photographs to show the effects her rape had on her family and community. Both women are two of the 32 from 25 countries whose works are featured together to demonstrate that we can’t ignore the violent problems facing women today.
“Throughout the world, women and girls are victims of countless and senseless acts of violence,” says Randy Jayne Rosenberg, executive director of the nonprofit group Art Works for Change and the show’s curator, said in a press release. “The range of gender-based violence is devastating, occurring, quite literally, from womb to tomb. It occurs in every segment of society, regardless of class, ethnicity, culture, or whether the country is at peace of war. Often, the victim’s only crime is that she is female.”
We highly recommend you fly down to Mexico to see this, but if you can’t make it until next year, save your airline miles. It’ll be coming to the Chicago Cultural Center on Jan. 22, 2011.
Photo courtesy of Art Works for Change.