Vancouver-based artist redrawing objectified Sarah Baartman as beautiful, strong woman
Posted February 27, 2022 9:11 pm.
Last Updated February 28, 2022 9:26 am.
A Vancouver artist is showcasing her portraits of Sarah Baartman through a redrawing of the Black woman who was exploited and objectified in caricatures.
Baartman was an 18th-century woman from the Western Cape of South Africa who was stolen from Africa by European men and forced into a circus act because of how she looked.
To honour her life, artist Sade Alexis has taken on a project that strives to portray Baartman in a different light.
“Because she had a condition called steatopygia, which makes fat gather in your breasts and buttocks, they thought she was an amazing circus act that they had to bring around Europe. She spent … years … being treated awfully. She was forced into sex trafficking, she was forced into human circuses and zoos with other animals,” Alexis explains. “She was just treated in the most inhumane way possible.”
Baartman died around the age of 26.
“When she died, a scientist … decided that she was the link between humans and animals. He studied her body and plasticized her remains and pickled her brain and her genitals, which then went on to live in a … museum.”
In 2002, South African President Nelson Mandela requested that Baartman’s remains be returned.
“Her story really stuck with me, especially because of the fact that her body never was laid to rest,” Alexis told CityNews.
After learning more about Baartman, the local artist used her knowledge to create something as an act of kindness.
“I wanted to create an artistic rendering of her that wasn’t focused on her body, that wasn’t racist, that wasn’t misogynistic. I wanted it to be something that really spoke to who she was and spoke to her humanity and also the culture that she was taken from.”
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Alexi says she hopes her art can educate the public of Baartman’s mistreatment and depict her in a way that empowers how she was perceived.
“When I decided that I wanted to draw Sarah, I knew that I didn’t want to use any of the artifacts like the visual artifacts that exist from that time. Because all of those depictions are really, they’re just awful. They’re very racist. They’re caricatures. And so I decided that I would research the people that she was from as a means of understanding like how their face shapes are, what kind of like trends that I see in their facial features, so that I could kind of come up with her face or imagine what she looked like,” she explains.
“Then I did some more research about the Khoikhoi people because I really wanted this to be a homecoming for her, I wanted it to represent her people, I wanted it to represent the land that she was from, because the Khoikhoi people have really rich, long-standing tradition, and I did research about the beading practices that they have. And then I did some research about just like the land itself, and what animals are present there, what plants are present there. And so I’ve used the plants and animals as a way to connect her back to the land in a more literal way … and then all the beadwork is used as like protection.”
Alexis’s project called “Safe Home Sarah” is for display at the Richmond Cultural Centre.
“I think that you can see, every single moment that I’ve spent in this piece, you can see every second of work and care and love and kindness that I put into it. And to me, this piece is super successful because not only is it creating a new way of looking at Sarah, a new person to look at, or an image to look at when we think of her, but it’s also it’s just such a good depiction of how much I care for her and how much I love her.”
