
Multimedia exhibition spotlights rape trauma
Revered cinematographer and journalist Elisa Iannacone premieres her globally acclaimed and extremely provocative exhibition – “The Spiral of Containment: Rape’s Aftermath” – to Joburg’s Structure Hill from Saturday, 14 Might till Thursday, 30 June.
The Spiral of Containment: Rape’s Aftermath is a multimedia immersive and experiential exhibition that includes 24 poignant portraits of rape survivors from internationally. The exhibition is curated for set up within the chilling 25 Isolation Cells on the backside of Quantity 4 Jail. It consists of textual content and digital hyperlinks to the oral testimonies of rape survivors.

Iannacone says on her web site that “The Spiral of Containment: Rape’s Aftermath is a travelling artwork exhibition that highlights the affect of rape by way of images, an immersive soundscape, and a hologram”.
Composed of 24 images, soundscapes, installations, and one holographic projection (self-portrait), the suite of images on exhibition function a rape survivor in a fictionally constructed portrait — magical-realist in model. The photographs draw from every topic’s recollections of their harrowing experiences, reframed, and reworked into layered statements of empowerment, company, and identification.
She says the exhibition makes use of artwork to specific trauma. “Every picture is the visible translation of a rape survivor’s private story, a collective outcry of shared expertise,” she notes.
The portraits on show had been photographed in a spread of places and nations internationally, together with seven in South Africa. The 24 photos are “colour-coded” into 24 major, secondary, and tertiary colors within the color wheel, along with her picture, the twenty fifth, contained in a monochromatic hologram.
The challenge and the strategy of its composition developed from Iannacone’s personal expertise of rape and therapeutic restoration. A revered overseas correspondent, Iannacone funded the challenge, which took 5 years to finish, from her work in battle zones.
Iannacone was born in Mexico and studied BFA Movie Manufacturing at York College in Canada in addition to an MA Worldwide Journalism diploma on the Metropolis College in London. She has labored as a photographer, filmmaker, journalist, overseas correspondent, and human rights documentarian on six continents. Her work has been revealed by the BBC, Newsweek, and Nationwide Geographic. It covers an assortment of reports themes, together with battle zones and humanitarian crises such because the Rabaa bloodbath, home violence in Syrian refugee camps in Iraq, and cyclone Idai in Mozambique.
“My profession as a cinematographer and photojournalist got here to a sudden halt after I used to be sexually assaulted in 2011. After the assault, I felt like a shadow of an individual, with out a lot course, and barely any capability to navigate the earth,” she explains.
By means of artwork remedy, Iannacone says she began to course of her assault creatively.
“I reached out to different individuals who had been raped to discover the photographs that spiralled of their minds. The end result turned a challenge that goals to affect individuals world wide.”
The Spiral of Containment: Rape’s Aftermath exhibition opens at Structure Hill on Saturday, 14 Might at 11 a.m. It’s going to run all through June, Youth Month. The South African premiere, which marks the graduation of a world tour of the exhibition on each the artwork truthful and heritage circuits, is the primary public viewing of the exhibition since its UK debut at The OXO Tower Bargehouse in London in 2018.
The exhibition programme incorporates workshops specializing in rape, authorized procedures, and justice, in addition to utilizing artwork as testimony
12/05/2022