Alexis Hunter, The Object Series, 1974-75. Image courtesy of Trish Clark Gallery.
Alexis Hunter, The Object Series, 1974-75. Image courtesy of Trish Clark Gallery.

ArtNovember 16, 2019

The Spinoff survey on gender bias in the art world, part 2: The galleries respond

Guest writer
Alexis Hunter, The Object Series, 1974-75. Image courtesy of Trish Clark Gallery.
Alexis Hunter, The Object Series, 1974-75. Image courtesy of Trish Clark Gallery.

Our recent Spinoff Art survey provided a snapshot on gender equality in the local art scene, but it wasn’t the full story. Anna Knox continues the conversation by asking some gallery owners and directors for their responses to our findings.

The Spinoff’s survey of gender bias in visual arts found that the industry continues to struggle with sexism, with the data suggesting that male art school graduates are four times more likely to succeed as artists than female graduates. However some readers felt that the article itself was biased – against men.

This reaction had some validity. For my original article I only spoke to one male gallery dealer, and only briefly, although this was mostly due to the lack of response to my query email. However, in the interests of gender equality, I decided to exit my own echo chamber and continue the kōrero.

Male directors’ response to gender bias

No-one I talked to denied there was a bias against female artists in Aotearoa. This bias manifests most visibly in the art market, especially in sales at auction houses, and in a wider art world that continues to be dominated by the success of male artists. Gallery directors Michael Lett (of Michael Lett) and Scott Lawrie (of The Vivian) both said it’s an issue that’s raised regularly at their galleries and is something they work actively to address. “It’s proven that there is an unconscious bias,” Lett told me. “The data is the data.”

At Bowerbank Ninow, Simon Bowerbank was concerned about drawing conclusions from the incomplete data gathered in our survey. “These issues are important and deserve to be investigated in-depth – there is a lot of room for writing that really gets its teeth into gender, ethnicity and class inequalities, in order to build a nuanced picture of the contemporary pressures being placed on both artists and their galleries.”

Simon Bowerbank and artist Georgie Hill install ‘Residence within a Prism’, Bowerbank Ninow, September 2019.

Simon ran an auction house from 2015 until earlier this year, and points out that the historical roots must be acknowledged. “The mechanics of the secondary market… are based on the historical artistic canon, which is overwhelmingly male. So, if you are talking about systemic bias, then it’s hard to argue that the art world doesn’t have a bias towards men.”

In terms of addressing that bias, however, he had no immediate suggestions, although he thought that it was more complicated than looking at percentages and emphasised that he was always just trying to get the best artists he could get.

Lett is cautious not to approach the issue in a deterministic way, practicing a general awareness rather than aiming for particular numbers. “We try to be conscious in terms of how we programme things, without going into a place where it becomes so obviously skewed in one direction,” he says. He points out that every art fair the gallery has done this year has been a solo exhibition of a female artist but is also careful not to make too much of that. “You don’t want to end up being like an institution or, dare I say it, a kind of funding body, where it’s got to be boy, girl, boy, girl. That to me takes away so much from the achievements of the artists.”

Hannah Valentine, Toss Woollaston, ‘Something other, held in common’, installation view, Bowerbank Ninow, August 2019.

The ‘talent’ issue is the crux

For both Lett and Bowerbank it seems the crux of addressing gender bias lies in this tension between a policy approach which confronts bias systematically, and the fact that art is not just a numbers game. Each dealer represents artists they believe produce work of high quality, but that value is not measured quantitively. There’s a fear of box-ticking – and how that could impact the integrity of each gallery. “It makes me feel sick,” Lett said, when I told him his current ratio of male to female represented artists, according to his website. “But I don’t think a great reaction for us would be to suddenly let five male artists go from our books to correct the balance, or suddenly go out and grab some more female artists.”

Scott Lawrie, director of The Vivian in Matakana calls this “the talent issue”. Unlike Bowerbank and Lett, he doesn’t consider it a barrier to prioritising gender when considering which artists to represent and show. “Look, I just don’t think it’s that complicated,” he told me. “There’s representation, for which we have a 50/50 model, as best we can. And then there’s showing, and that’s about bringing a holistic balance into your programming over a year.”

It might be his smaller gallery and his slightly maverick status in the New Zealand art world that permits it – he’s Scottish, a star of Grand Designs NZ season 1, and bought The Vivian partly to allow more room for his own collection – but he makes the process of addressing gender bias seem very simple. “There’s this idea that it’s tokenism. Dealer Melanie Rogers says it’s got to be about the art. And she’s absolutely right of course – it’s got to be about the art!” he told me. “But there’s a moment of consciousness where you go – who are we going to choose to get the balance right?”

Scott Lawrie of The Vivian, Matakana

Enjoy diversity

Knowing that the art community in Aotearoa is varied and numerous, I went to Enjoy Contemporary Art Space in Wellington for a different perspective from a non-profit sector. Director Sophie Davis said Enjoy responds directly to bias through their organisational culture, which is very distinct from that of a private gallery, where a director is not necessarily answerable to anyone. With a board that is all-female, bar one, it’s unsurprising that white male artists aren’t over-represented at the gallery.

Davis said gender bias to be a given in visual arts but also that data an insufficient, even inappropriate, way to look at it. Like Bowerbank, she was wary of the data we analysed in our original survey, and of responding to it. She suggested that talking to individuals about their experiences would be better and told me the gallery would never ask an artist about data points such as gender or ethnic identity.

There’s something powerful in being concerned only with your immediate, unique community and their experiences, but it has its own limits. In the sixth (brief, frank, beautiful) essay accompanying Enjoy’s current Present Tense: Wāhine Toi Aotearoa exhibition, writer Emma Ng describes those working in the creative industries as being “of diverse genders, ethnicities, and economic realities” which is close to how Davis described Enjoy’s board. But how does this translate into shifting the overall status quo in the market for non-male artists?

Imogen Taylor, ‘Betwixt and Between’, Installation View, Michael Lett, Auckland, 2019.

Anon, carry on

“Everything intersects,” Lett said when I asked him how he evaluates a potential artist or work. “When you make a decision you’re often thinking about who is already of interest to other people, you are picking up on a zeitgeist of sorts, you’re looking at where there is interest from museums or curators or writers.”

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His point is that the value of an artist is not established singularly.

But what makes an artwork valuable, appealing, part of the zeitgeist, worthy of attention and focus, or marketable? And what would happen if somehow, magically, all artworks suddenly became anonymous and the question of gender identity was removed from evaluation? If we had zero data on identity, would the historically-rooted bias in favour of the success of white, male artists continue?

Acknowledging the reality of gender bias is something everyone in this brief discussion seemed to agree on. But it’s the first sentence in what needs to be an ongoing multi-faceted kōrero on how to address that imbalance.

Fiona Connor, Shop Doors, 2005. Sold at Webb’s Auction House in September, 2019. Price Realized incl. BP$10,516.25. Estimated at $6,000-$10,000. A recent sale highlight by a living woman artist from a Webb’s auction.
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Mulame comprises nine hand-embroidered works and a video reel (Photo: Samuel Hartnett)
Mulame comprises nine hand-embroidered works and a video reel (Photo: Samuel Hartnett)

OPINIONArtNovember 13, 2019

A meditation on exile: an embroidery project draws us nearer to the Congo

Guest writer
Mulame comprises nine hand-embroidered works and a video reel (Photo: Samuel Hartnett)
Mulame comprises nine hand-embroidered works and a video reel (Photo: Samuel Hartnett)

Artist Lema Shamamba highlights the threads that connect cellphone use to violence and exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo in her first solo exhibition at Auckland’s Objectspace.  

Embroidered into a purple and yellow dress, a woman has one baby slung on her front and another on her back. Looking at her bright colours, you might think the sky was laughing. Three other women till the soil, as if the harvest will yield plenty to eat.

Beside these women are two shadowy, grey figures holding machine guns. The machine guns are embroidered in the same colour thread as the men. It’s as if their bodies are weapons.

Lema Shamamba, Mulame, 2019. Image: Samuel Hartnett. 

Mulame is artist Lema Shamamba’s first solo show, held at Objectspace in Ponsonby, Auckland. It comprises nine hand-embroidered works and a video reel, exploring regular lives and the way they rub up against conflict and economic exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Lema came here as a refugee in 2009.

Mulame is an expression in the Kihunde dialect for wishing someone a long life. It literally means “be there forever”.  It’s a sobering, ironic title paired with the profound loss evoked throughout the work: of village, lives, extracted metals and homeland. The work refers to what Lema says some called a “black season of insecurity” in her village in Bweremana, Masisi. Rebels target villages across the eastern territory of DRC, destroying homes and property and raping women. A 2017 UN report says that conflict-related sexual violence in DRC is used to “intimidate”, “retaliate” and “punish” communities and families. How easily gender is weaponised during unrest. How much women suffer.

Lema Shamamba, Mulame, 2019. Image: Samuel Hartnett. 

Turmoil in DRC started in 1994 following the Rwandan genocide, when 1.2 million Rwandan Hutus fled to Kivu in eastern DRC fearing retribution for the genocide. In 1996 Rwanda and Uganda invaded eastern DRC to find the perpetrators. Tutsi “rebels” formed armed groups, controlling eastern DRC. 

When I ask Lema about why she has created this work, she speaks calmly, with an air of quiet confidence: “They know that there is no one who is watching them.”   

She is vehement about the impact of DRC’s conflict on women. “They know when they destroy women, they destroy the whole community. They destroy the whole country.” 

The purple-and-yellow mother figure carrying babies lingers for me.  

When I watch the video works, which help orient the viewer to the DRC, I notice things familiar to my own vanua in Fiji; a woman’s hands cutting meat off a bone, and faded plastic tubs and buckets filled with water. I wonder whether the New Zealand Tongan curator Ane Tonga also found herself orienting via Pacific constellations.

 A woman in an elaborate kitenge dress happily talks and gestures in Swahili. Above her head on a painted concrete wall is a public health poster explaining how to avoid ebola.

Lema Shamamba, Mulame, 2019. Image: Haru Sameshima

Throughout Mulame there is a mix of both the familiar and domestic – a hen stitched in black thread – alongside things that are profoundly disturbing – the harm wrought by political and economic violence. In my favourite piece, the final embroidered panel, the logos of companies are stitched in alongside a woman holding her baby beneath a tree, alongside a hand grenade, a gun and a machete. Another figure – perhaps a child – is bent over, dead or in pain. The companies include Nokia, Motorola, HP, Intel, IBM, Toshiba and Dell.

These are companies that have sourced cobalt, coltan and other minerals from mines in DRC, used for cellphone batteries, and perhaps even more perversely, electric cars. 

A 2017 UN report says that DRC has 2.7 million internally displaced children, who are vulnerable to forced labour in mines. Diamonds, gold, copper and cobalt. While international pressure has meant some companies source minerals mined by mining corporations rather than artisanal miners (who are more likely to use forced labour), it’s still fraught with violent infractions. And how to feed those children? 

Lema Shamamba, Mulame, 2019. Image: Samuel Hartnett. 

Maybe we also need to be held to account for our use of these metals in our technologies. In one work, a thin line of red stitches extends from a cellphone. In another the metallic thread denoting the precious minerals extracted from DRC is the same as that used for a woman’s tears.  

The works are bordered with bright blue kitenge, wax-printed cloth, made by the artist’s sister, who has spent five years in a refugee camp in Uganda. Lema says the refugee application process has been confusing. Immigration New Zealand and the UNHCR gave her conflicting advice. Immigration minister Iain Lees-Galloway has recently announced the removal of a racist policy that required refugees from Africa and the Middle East to have family living here already, along with an increased allocation from 14 to 15%. But still, the racist policy lingers through the regional quotas: 50% goes to the Asia Pacific region despite Africa and the Middle East having the most need.

Lema’s work reminded me of arpilleras, the embroidered and sewn works crafted by Chilean women during the Pinochet dictatorship. These sometimes similarly depict bright rural landscape and militia. Beyond the aesthetic similarities, there’s a similarity in their production: women in potent political situations beyond their control who use whatever they have to hand. Needle and thread.

Lema Shamamba, Mulame, 2019. Image: Samuel Hartnett. 

It’s a strange resistance though, isn’t it? Embroidery is slow! Lema says they take her about a month to stitch. She learnt embroidery as a child, taught by her mother and aunties. A transformed colonial legacy from Belgium. And when I ask Lema about it, she explains that the embroidery transports her.

“When I do the embroidery, I knew that it will take long to do it. I feel much connection with how the women in my country are feeling. I feel that I’m working very hard with them in my country.”

Mulame, then, is a meditation on exile: to live despite another suffering world; to let your fingers and thread do the work of memory; to return to loss as a requisite for survival.  

Lema Shamamba, Mulame, 2019. Image: Samuel Hartnett.