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February Issue
2010
College of Charleston
School of the Arts in Charleston, SC, Offers Exhibits Focused
on Troubled African Nations
The College of Charleston School of the Arts in Charleston, SC, is presenting two new exhibits including: Jonathan Torgovnik - Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape and Heather McClintock - The Innocents: Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda, on view at the at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in the Marion and Wayland Cato Jr. Center for the Arts through Mar. 13, 2010.
Jonathan
Torgovnik
Intended Consequences is a traveling exhibition organized
by the Aperture Foundation of New York. The Halsey Institute's
Mark Sloan and Lizz Biswell co-curated The Innocents exhibition
along with the correlative programming for both exhibitions. The
combination of these two bodies of work is intended to highlight
humanitarian crises in two troubled African nations. These exhibitions
serve as examples of the College of Charleston's campus-wide commitment
to the discussion of international issues and highlight the College's
efforts to familiarize our audiences with aspects of history that
do not often receive in-depth attention in conventional media.
To better shed light on these issues, a number of educational
programs including lectures, a panel discussion and two film screenings
have been scheduled over the course of the exhibition. A book
drive for Better World Books began at the opening reception and
will continue throughout the course of the exhibit. All events
are free with the public encouraged to attend. The Halsey Institute's
programming is funded in part by a major grant from the Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
During the 1994 genocide, over one hundred thousand Rwandan women
were subjected to massive sexual violence perpetrated by members
of the infamous Hutu militia groups known as the Interhamwe. Among
the survivors, the most isolated are the Tutsi women who have
borne children as a result of being raped. In February of 2006,
Jonathan Torgovnik traveled to East Africa to report on a story
for Newsweek, coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the outbreak of HIV/AIDS.
While in Rwanda, Torgovnik met Odette, a survivor who was raped
during the genocide. As a result, she had a child and contracted
HIV/AIDS. Her horrific story led Torgovnik to return to Rwanda
to work on a personal project about women who were the victims
of the same heinous crimes. Intended Consequences: Rwandan
Children Born of Rape brings together Torgovnik's powerful
stories of these women. The exhibition on view is comprised of
twenty-five stunning individual portraits of the women with their
children accompanied by their testimonies: intensely personal
accounts of the daily challenges they face and their conflicted
feelings about raising a child who is a reminder of horrors endured.
For more than twenty years, a civil war in the north of Uganda
has claimed women and children as its primary victims. It is estimated
that the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has abducted as many as
66,000 youths under 20 years old, wrenching them from their families
and forcing them to become soldiers, porters and sex slaves. They
have inflicted grotesque carnage and senseless chaos on their
own people. Yet, whilst protecting the population of the north,
the Ugandan military has perpetrated its own share of massive
human rights abuses.
At the peak of the conflict, spread out over 80% of the region, two million Ugandans lived in massive, squalid camps that lack access to basic sanitation and resources. Hundreds of thousands still subsist in these camps today and tens of thousands of defenseless civilians were butchered, severely weakening cultural traditions. After years of stalled peace talks, failed military attempts to apprehend the indicted war criminal Kony, and his subsequent retraction and insurgency into other regions, northern Uganda may no longer be officially at war, but neither is it psychologically at peace.
Heather McClinock
Beginning in the fall of 2005, Heather McClintock lived in northern Uganda for just under a year. She began weaving the very tenuous threads of a new way of life, which led to months of travel throughout the northern part of the country where she learned firsthand of the ongoing civil war and the strife of the Acholi tribe. The results of her work there are shown in the exhibit, The Innocents: Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda.
Jonathan Torgovnik was born in 1969 in Israel and received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His photographs have been widely exhibited and published in numerous international publications, including Newsweek, Aperture, GEO, Sunday Times Magazine, and Stern, among others. He has been a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine since 2005, and is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography School in New York. In 2007, Torgovnik won the National Portrait Gallery's Photographic Portrait Prize for an image from Intended Consequences. He is also co-founder of Foundation Rwanda; a non-profit organization that supports secondary school education for Rwandan children born of rape and addresses the mental health needs of their mothers.
Heather McClintock, originally from Vermont, was seeking a more intimate connection to humanity and the commonalities of our existence. She received her BA from New England College in New Hampshire. She started documenting the struggles of the Acholi tribe of Northern Uganda in 2006. McClintock states that her images only touch on the Acholi's unimaginable suffering. Her Uganda portfolio has garnered several awards and recognitions, including most recently being selected for the prestigious Eddie Adam's Barnstorm XXI Workshop in 2008.
McClintock was also awarded an artist's sponsorship by Blue Earth Alliance for The Innocents: Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda project, Merit of Excellence and Honorable Mention in the 2007 International Color Awards Photography Master's Cup, the 2006 Center for Photographic Art Artist Project Award, the 2008 and 2006 Photo Review International, and First Prize and Honorable Mention in photojournalism in the Black & White Spider Awards.
For further information
check our SC Institutional Gallery listings, call the gallery
at 843/953-5680 or visit (www.halsey.cofc.edu).
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