In 1975, Martha Rosler, in a video piece entitled the ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’, explored the violence the transform of the female into her own system of the signs of the violence of her own domestication and oppression. In 2018, the artist brings this semiotic gesture to the developing world, but instead of taking on a role herself, the artist explores the semiotics and actual violence of banal objects for every day women in Pakistan.
Part of an ongoing video, photographic and sculptural investigation, in each instance, the women portrayed, from her own mother, cousins, friends to local domestic servants, present to the artist quotidian household objects as objects which have been used against them as agents of domestic violence in Pakistan, a country wherein honour killings are still a pervasive and permitted practice.
In this iteration of the project, the artist photographed a domestic worker, Rashida, who claimed her space by working, stepping outside from private space of the home to the public space, primarily in order to educate her three daughters, hoping to change their destiny, their future.
Part of an ongoing video, photographic and sculptural investigation, in each instance, the women portrayed, from her own mother, cousins, friends to local domestic servants, present to the artist quotidian household objects as objects which have been used against them as agents of domestic violence in Pakistan, a country wherein honour killings are still a pervasive and permitted practice.
In this iteration of the project, the artist photographed a domestic worker, Rashida, who claimed her space by working, stepping outside from private space of the home to the public space, primarily in order to educate her three daughters, hoping to change their destiny, their future.
