women issues communication services agency(WICSA)

FORWARD-Germany is our principal partner in the crusade against.
FGM) . See their website: http://www.forward-germany.de

Below are some pictures of the German Exhibition in 2000 AD

 Joy  in the flowing African robe, discussing with Professor Tobe Levin Chairperson, FORWARD GERMANY, at Mannheim Germany, 2000 AD

Dr Waltraud Dumont Du Voitel with Joy during the exhibition

Joy Standing in front of one of the paintings during the Mannheim exhibition in Germany, 2000AD

 Joy being interviewed by a local journalist in Essen, Germany in  August of  2000, while her 4 year old daughter, Daniella, looks on.

Through the Eyes of Art: Confronting FGM

By Tobe Levin and Joy Walker

In Lagos, Nigeria, Nkechi Nnaji had been “circumcised” when she was five. At age twelve, in the mid-1990s, she came to the attention of activist Joy Keshi   who, with colleagues, became concerned about the girl’s lifelong suffering. The amputation of her genital organ had entailed serious complications that overwhelmed her childhood.

Nnaji never fully recovered. While her peers were in school, Nkechi was living in and out of hospitals. The financial, physical and emotional torture she had undergone  “left an indelible mark in my mind,” Keshi remembers, “and I vowed then and there to do what I could to stop female genital mutilation.”

Moving from thought to action, Keshi,  a marketing communications specialist, founded “Women’s Issues Communication Services” in Lagos to advocate for women and their target audience using the arts. For many years a senior advertising executive in  Nigeria’s leading agency, Keshi was convinced that creative visuals, able to modify people’s opinions of goods and services, could change attitudes towards harmful traditional practices as well.

With this insight, Joy approached well-known artist Sam Ovraiti to enlist his help in formulating a call for artworks. The idea was to produce a traveling exhibit emphasizing “The Suffering. The Sorrow. The Setback” associated with FGM in Nigeria

In October 1998, the exhibition hall of the Leventis Foundation Marina in Lagos housed the first show, with moral support from the Goethe Institute. It attracted visitors from all walks of life -- medicine, business, diplomacy, media and government.

Of artists who responded, most were men, deliberately wooed because, after all, without male backing the problem can’t be solved. Yet many contributors were skeptical. In their twenties and early thirties, the painters and sculptors were expected to supply their own canvas and stone. Yes, it was an important issue, but they had to make a living. Who would buy or, especially, want to look at motifs on such a theme? As artist Godfrey Williams-Okorodus said, “Most were willing to participate but in a restrained way. When my colleagues saw how much effort I invested [in producing "Defiance of Pain 1 and Defiance 2" they laughed. Why take such pains when you’re going to paint over the canvas anyway?” Little did anyone foresee that one fifth of the original artworks – the rest remaining in Nigeria -- would be displayed for the next six years in Germany, with short detours to Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and the UK where, on November 22, 2000, the canvasses would enhance the British Parliament at a multi-partisan celebration of the report leading to the Female Genital Mutilation Act of 2003. The paintings would subsequently travel on to the USA where visitors could view them at Harvard, Cornell, Brandeis and several other universities.

But returning to the early days, it soon also became apparent that the male volunteers knew very little about FGM. So Joy coached them in several weekend seminars, enabling them to interpret the theme in various media. Some were so moved by the graphic nature of the procedure and the excruciating pain that one, Wande George, depicted  the  harrowing experience in his painting The Child Weeps. Other artists, however, chose to highlight the topic’s complexity, filling their canvas with stories in which, for instance, resistance is tried but fails (Menassah Imonikebe. “What If I Refuse?”).

The painters also learned that Nigeria is home to all conceivable forms of cutting practices, extending from infibulation to clitoridectomy as performed by the Igbo tribe on baby girls in their first month of life. In another variant, some ethnic groups in Nigeria also remove the clitoris while the woman is in

labor with her first child, believing the organ fatal should the infant’s head touch it. These and other motifs would find their way into finely wrought, narrative images on canvas and chiseled in stone.

Art, then, conveys to both literate and illiterate the pain and degradation of the custom, as the oeuvres function like stained glass windows, telling simply a complicated tale. The arts, moreover, cross barriers of language and cultural diversity in Africa’s largest nation, with over 120 million people and more than 250 languages and dialects. Because words can sometimes be offensive or judgmental, a visual medium that transcends ethnic sensitivities invites the viewer to become his or her own imaginative witness. The paintings implicate; they don’t alienate.

Art is also, paradoxically, appropriate to the subject because it ennobles. Acutely aware of racist stereotyping, the exhibit showcases the tools of high culture enlisted in indigenous efforts to overcome a noxious social practice. In other words, while the art is about FGM, it is also about the artists, about dignity, and about the possibility of life free from harm.

And so Walker’s idea bore fruit. Painters and sculptors took the harmful tradition as the subject matter of their work. Following the briefing, they produced 80 pieces including oil, water colors, copper etchings and statues. Only weeks after the

opening, Walker left for the “Women in Africa and the African Diaspora” (WAAD) conference on “Health and Human Rights” at the University of Indiana, Indianapolis, with several of the most expressive canvasses. There, she met Tobe Levin and both agreed that a sensible awareness-raising project for the recently founded FORWARD – Germany would be to exhibit the art. Sixteen paintings, therefore, came to Germany where they were on display  from 4 February 2000 until 26 February 2006 in close to 70 venues,  including city halls, municipal ministries of health,  churches, women’s centers, medical schools and the EXPO 2000.

With each stop, people who might otherwise have known little about FGM became enlightened, and many were also moved to act.