The Deconstructed Halo

After I found the comments on my graffiti labeling Jacob Zuma as a rapist, I decided to focus in my new intervention art-project on women I am involved with, who are still today, 17 years into the history of a New South Africa, victims of patriarchy, paternalism, stereotyping and abuse. I ask myself how much has really changed for ordinary women in this country.

My concept is grounded in the theory of liminality, as described by Victor Turner. The term refers to a state of in-between, denoting the second phase of initiation ceremonies when the initiant become symbolically detached from an earlier fixed point in the social structure and her status becomes liminal, even marginal. The individual lives outside her normal environment and are brought to question herself and the existing social order. She comes to feel without identity, nameless, spatio-temporally dislocated and socially unstructured (Turner 1974:231-270).

He states: "One's sense of identity dissolves to some extend, bringing about disorientation, but also the possibility of new perspectives".

If liminality is regarded as a time and place of withdrawal from normal modes of social action, it potentially can be seen as a period of scrutiny for central values and axioms of the culture where it occurs; one where normal limits to thought, self understanding and behaviour are undone.

I find myself also in such a liminal phase - no longer the privileged white woman, having to re-evaluate my own perspectives and cultural frameworks.

I chose seven women or madonnas; real individuals who survived their period of liminality and suffering, and re-assimilated into society on their own terms.

Although damaged and scarred, and with deconstructed halos, I regard them as the real saints.