DEFENDING OUR FUTURES: AN EXHIBITION

Why the Defending Our Futures Exhibition?

Each day women all over the world are working. Resisting. Speaking truth to power. We fight marginalization. We sacrifice our lives to build movements for change. Each day, we win big and small yet equally profound victories towards the creation of a world where each of us can live in freedom. Yet, we do not tell enough of these stories and more often not in our own words.

Gabrielle Le Roux and Sipho Mthathi felt that at a global gathering like the AWID Forum, an additional platform should be created for Sheroes, Leaders, Insubordinate women, to tell the stories of their life-work.

The Process of Creating the Exhibition

View images of the Defending Our Dreams exhibition as it was created

Gabrielle Le Roux and Sipho Mthathi in collaboration with AWID Forum participants created an exhibition that celebrates and recognizes brave social movement builders from around the world.

Along the length of the busy CTICC thoroughfare through which the thousands of AWID participants thronged, easels were put up with signs in English, French, and Spanish saying that the art that would hang there was in the process of being created.

Gabrielle drew the movement-builders portraits from life in this space so the exhibition took shape during the days of the conference. Each woman was invited to write and draw directly onto her own portrait, making her mark and sharing insights and symbols that were precious and meaningful to her, she also wrote more about herself on a separate sheet of paper.

Sipho interviewed them about their lives and work away from the noise. The process provided a dynamic and unique reflection of the diversity of participants, capturing examples of best practice in the field of movement building as well as providing another platform through which women activists can engage with the broad spectrum of current questions facing them as movement builders.

It is not intended as a Who’s Who? Women volunteered themselves or nominated each other. We see it as the beginning of a long process of naming and honouring and hope to extend it with AWID.

Gabrielle Le Roux is a feminist cultural activist and artist who collaboratively creates traveling exhibitions of portraits and stories. Her work pays tribute to the rebels and survivors - people whose brave work and inspiring lives are not sufficiently recognized (or worse yet constantly at risk) in our society because of their work for social justice, or their gender, colour, sexual orientation or class. Gabrielle Le Roux's Portrait and Story Projects record and celebrate diversity, and what Pregs Govender has named, in her book of the same title, The Politics of Love and Courage.

Sipho Mthathi is a feminist activist, educator, poet, writer working from Cape Town. Sipho believes that telling our stories is the most powerful way to reclaim our power and essence as women in a world where patriarchy operates to dehumanize and erase us. It is this belief that has driven her to begin work, as part of a group of feminists from the Southern African region, to establish a Women’s Writing Institute. Sipho writes both fiction and non-fiction and is currently working on her first novel and poetry anthology.

View a list of Gabrielle's exhibitions here: