Artists have a complex set of ethical and aesthetic considerations to keep in mind when they represent sexual violence and its aftermath. In the performing arts, depictions of rape on stage or screen are likely to elicit audience objections for graphic and/or triggering subject matter. Yet if the violence is stylised, portrayed through symbolism or narrated rather than shown — all common choices — there is a chance that the horror experienced by victims of sexual violence, and the courage shown by survivors, are not fully conveyed.
Visual artists face similar challenges, with the additional complication that they might seek to condense profound trauma (and even recovery) into a single image or set of images. Photographs, in particular, capture an instant in time; how, then, to communicate the unfolding journey of a rape survivor or a community of survivors?
In The Spiral of Containment: Rape’s Aftermath, Elisa Iannacone manages to do just this through an astonishing collection of photographs of people who have been sexually violated. There are 25 images in total, 24 of them portraits of anonymous subjects, each given a specific colour. The final one is a self-portrait — for this body of work emerges from Iannacone’s own experience of sexual assault and the process of art therapy that helped her to heal.
0 of 2
A Canadian-Mexican photojournalist and filmmaker, Iannacone has travelled around the world as a foreign correspondent and documentarian. The Spiral of Containment, too, is cosmopolitan; the women (and men) it portrays are testament to rape as a global blight. Seven of them were photographed in SA, and it feels sadly appropriate that our country should feature so prominently. After a handful of works were displayed at the Cape Town Art Fair and at Nirox outside Johannesburg, the full collection — which was launched in London in 2018 — is now being exhibited at Constitution Hill.
The location is both apt and haunting. To get there, visitors walk through the bleak courtyard of what used to be Number Four prison. This was the section of the Old Fort complex reserved for “natives”, and it has become storied as the site of incarceration of Mohandas Gandhi, Robert Sobukwe and other political prisoners. Yet it should not be romanticised or idealised. The origins of some of SA’s most notorious prison gangs can be traced here.
A grim sight awaits at the far end of the prison: 26 small isolation cells, in a brutally symmetrical row. The installation of the exhibition in this space, one photograph per room, leaves a single cell empty. This seems to gesture towards the survivors of sexual assault whose stories remain untold or hidden.
0 of 4
For the 25 subjects in the photographs, however, telling their story — in eloquent accompanying texts that also help the viewer to interpret the densely packed frame of each image — is empowering and freeing. In one sense, the accounts are painfully familiar as we read about attacks committed by strangers and abuse perpetrated by family members. Perhaps they are not painful enough. Perhaps South Africans, especially, are numbed by the frequency of reports of sexual assault, which makes them simultaneously gruesome and mundane.
This makes the achievement of Iannacone’s collaboration with her subjects all the more remarkable, for each photograph insists on our attention and attentiveness. Posture and facial expression are, in most cases, ambiguous: they are variously defiant, plaintive, triumphant, terrified, blank, pensive, hopeful. Even more striking is the composition of the scenes in which the subjects find themselves.
The settings are surreal, magical-realist and uncanny. Recurring motifs include houses or buildings in states of decay, interiors merging with the natural world, bodies of water (or bodies in water), disrupted domestic scenes and evocations of childhood. The subjects are immersed in these worlds — the elements of each scene are conjured from their psyche, their memory, their imagination — but they also seem out of place and, somehow, out of time.
To put it another way: the images create their own timescapes along with their own landscapes, each one emerging from (and merging with) the psycho-spiritual and emotional journey of a survivor.
• The Spiral of Containment: Rape’s Aftermath is at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg until June 30 2022. The exhibition can also be viewed online at elisaiannacone.com.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.