Intervention 1 KA

"In 2021, the French Senate passed an amendment banning
girls under 18 from wearing the hijab in public."

"In places including North Korea & Sudan, women can be
punished or fined for wearing pants."

"Women in Saudi Arabia were forbidden from driving until 2018.
In parts of India, women are exempt from wearing helmets on motorcycles,
leading to 1000s of injuries and deaths each year."

"More than 1/3 of Pakistani girls do not go to primary school.
Only 13% of girls are still in school by the 9th grade."

    My intervention is about the limited rights of women in other places of the world. I specifically focused on rights that are guaranteed to the average woman living in the United States of America, like myself, and those involving “everyday” topics we may not give a second thought. I chose to address this issue because its importance has continuously demanded my attention. Growing up, I was able to learn more about women’s rights issues and become more aware of the juxtaposition between my experiences and the experiences of others due to differences in where we lived. Reading books like Malala Yousafzai’s “I am Malala'' and hearing news stories about changes made more recently than I would have expected, like how women in Sudan were prevented from driving until less than 5 years ago, further contributed to my interest in these issues. I would always be bewildered by how things that seem commonplace to me, such as being able to go to school or wear what I choose, are not so run-of-the-mill for millions of other girls and women. These entirely different sets of rules stem from systems framed by patriarchy and are often enforced through the use of force and violence. As bell hooks explains in Understanding Patriarchy, the lack of acknowledging this as a factor of restrictions on women’s rights only contributes to the continuation of these constraints and cycles of violence, “Despite the many gains of contemporary feminist movement—greater equality for women in the workforce, more tolerance for the relinquishing of rigid gender roles—patriarchy as a system remains intact, and many people continue to believe that it is needed if humans are to survive as a species. This belief seems ironic, given that patriarchal methods of organizing nations, especially the insistence on violence as a means of social control, has actually led to the slaughter of millions of people on the planet,” (29-30). 

    Artist Lucy Orta from the “Nomads” chapter of The Interventionists served as inspiration for my intervention. Works such as her “Refuge Wear” series and her “Collective Wear” sculptures highlighted issues she was passionate about and wanted to bring attention to, especially those she witnessed occurring in real-time. This motivated me to consider what issue I was interested in learning more about and wanted to bring awareness to within my own community. I decided to build facts and statistics about the issue of women’s rights into my intervention through a performance of the information using large text on eye-catching white posters. I found plenty of facts and statistics when researching and wanted to emulate Orta’s striking pieces through selecting those that were the most jarring and would stick with those who read them. The Interventionists illustrates how the locations of Orta’s works of “Nexus Architecture” were changed, which impacted the contexts they were viewed in, “Her ‘Collective Wear’ sculptures in the form of tent domes with protruding appendages, exhibited in the Modern Art museum in Paris in 1994, were placed into urban contexts for a series of interventions in housing estates, subway stations... and later developed into a human chain,” (19). My intervention was also sight-specific, as I displayed a poster about education in front of a local school and a poster about driving and motor safety by my car in an area frequented by people walking, running, and driving. I also displayed posters about wearing certain clothing in public in popular public parks in my town. I additionally wore jeans and used a bicycle helmet and backpack to emphasize the specific issues being addressed. My performance can be seen as activist art because it was used to draw attention to and educate about a social justice issue, as well as promote necessary change. As Kimberly Drew said in her book This Is What I Know About Art, “Small actions foster change. Our activism, like any other part of ourselves, develops into something bigger than a singular experience,” (61).