Saturday, September 10, 2016

Dark secret, 2016

DARK SECRET, a public art intervention, addresses the deep silence that exists in our society with regards to sexual violence.   Statistics of sexual assault and rape from around the world are alarming and only a fraction of these acts of violence are reported to the police. Victims and survivors offer different reasons for their reluctance to approach an authority to report this most personal of crimes – fear, mistrust, shame, guilt, pain. All over the world, these invasive assaults take place without outcry, hidden under the weight of hundreds of years of patriarchy.



DARK SECRET brings to the streets this secret kept in our societies, the secret of a terrible violence against women through the act of the rape and assault.

 The first public presentation of this piece was performed in Spain and denounced the 1289 reported rapes that take place in the country every year. Men and women went into the streets and silently held together 1289 pieces of underwear. 
In October 2016, DARK SECRET will travel to Toronto, Canada.  The silence will be broken, a quiet stoic rebellion that invites the public, allowing them to look and to deal with this old and terrible form of violence.

Through this hanging action we appreciate that the statistics often does not show the reality of the number. In this opportunity, we will hang 1890 underwear, the number of sexual assaults reported annually. 

rosa mesa  was born in Canary Islands and moved to Toronto in 1996 where she studied at the OCAD graduating in 2002. Her work has been exhibited in Spain, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Cuba, Canada, Brasil, Serbia, Germany, France  and Switzerland.
Considered a multidisciplinary artist, her works move between installations,  performance and public interventions. Her pieces are a response to her surroundings that become dissected and reconstructed in a new narrative that exposes whatever that triggers her in amusement or disgust. She has an interest in drawing as a medium of communication that is less charge than painting and her practice is often based in an observant and humoristic approach. She explores areas of semiotics and the art practice, identity, nomadism, migration,  feminism and the hybrid and changing state of contemporary culture. Starting from the point of considering the increasing aesthetization of life, where the object is send toward consumerism, the actions become a way to rebel against the absolute domination of economical value. Meaning, significance and other type of values are in jeopardy. She can be consider a socially engaged artist. She is a member of daily services and art platform based in Berlin. Since 2004 rosa works between Spain, Canada, Germany and Switzerland where she  has been doing several art residencies. Today she lives in Las Palmas, Spain.






https://www.facebook.com/rosa.mesa.315



Actividad incluida en el programa de la Bienal Miradas de Mujeres 2016 organizada por MAV 

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Project: Hidden hand, 2016: Missing




 Missing is the first of a number of projects dedicated to bring to public awareness the role of women in different communities all over the world. The public intervention consists in posting all over a town(in this case Hamilton) posters of a woman, asking if anybody knows who she is. A web site with an explanation about each woman is provided. The project serve as a way to generate awareness about important women in their communities as well as to have a statistic about how much people in the community really know about their existence and achievements. The idea is to open up a dialogue about why women work has gone unrecognized or underestimated and if there has been changes in this situation in the last decades.



Missing, 2016


 In this piece to be realize in Hamilton Ontario on October 11th the female character will be Elizabeth Catherine Bagshaw, physician (b near Cannington, Ont 18 Oct 1881; d at Hamilton, Ont 5 Jan 1982). She had a successful 60-year medical practice after graduating from University of Toronto (MB) in 1905, but is best known for her 30 years as medical director of the Hamilton Birth Control Clinic. Cheerful and courageous, she accepted the post in 1932 despite opposition from medical colleagues and local clergy and worked with dedicated volunteers to provide Hamilton women with inexpensive and reliable contraceptives. Bagshaw received numerous honours throughout her long life, including an honorary doctorate from McMaster. 








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