Art[4]Change: Unmasking Rape Culture

🔗 Canadian Art Magazine – Unmasking Rape Culture by Leah Sandals 🔗

Art[4]Change: Unmasking Rape Culture was a multifaceted initiative that explored the intersection of contemporary art, gender, and sexuality through the lens of scholars, performances, and visual artists.

The project featured an exhibition curated by Sally Frater and hosted at Centre[3] titled 20 Minutes of Action, including works by artists such as Shelley Niro, Insoon Ha, and Mary Walling Blackburn. These artworks addressed various aspects of rape culture, from its roots in colonialism to its manifestations in modern society.

Complementing the exhibition, the two-day conference Unmasking Rape Culture was held on November 23 and 24, 2017 at McMaster University’s L.R. Wilson Hall and The Spice Factory. The conference featured lectures, performances, and discussions with speakers including Farrah Khan, Julie Lalonde, and members of the Hamilton Youth Poets. The event aimed to foster dialogue and raise awareness about sexual violence and its cultural implications.

In addition, Too Hot to Handle was a community arts pop-up project that explored the intersection between sexual violence and bystander intervention. To introduce and launch Too Hot to Handle, Centre[3] hosted an outdoor pop-up coffee shop at the October 2018 Art Crawl. Coffee was given away for free to engage passersby who interacted with its cardboard sleeves — since the coffee was too hot to handle without one. These weren’t just ordinary coffee sleeves. These sleeves had probing questions and screen printed messages on them, thematically-based on the role of the bystander in situations of sexual violence and harassment. This public activity produced community research around the role of the bystander, and initiated the application process for the Too Hot to Handle series of upcoming workshops.

Using their own experiences and the research results as jumping off point, 12 participants — all of whom identify as survivors of sexual violence and harassment — worked with professional artist, designer, and activist Sheila Sampath from The Public, an activist design studio specializing in changing the world. Together, they co-designed and co-created imagery for generic coffee cup sleeves that explored the role of the bystander in situations of sexual violence and harassment, and discussed best practices for engaging bystanders and how to take action safely and effectively in contexts where sexual violence occurs. Upon completion of the designs, the participants screen printed the images onto hundreds of coffee cup sleeves which were then distributed at our favourite local progressive coffee shop SMALLS, as well as other participating coffee shops in neighbouring cities Toronto, Guelph, and Brantford. They offerred the sleeves to their customers, igniting conversation around this very HOT topic. Hope it wasn’t too hot to handle!

To celebrate the launch of the sleeves, Centre[3] hosted a Coffee Sleeve Launch Party on International Women’s Day 2019, 7-10pm Friday March 8th at Art Forms Studio, with free coffee, hot chocolate, tea and sweets.

Through this initiative, Centre[3] provided a platform for artists and activists to engage the public in critical conversations about rape culture, emphasizing the role of art in social change.