20 February–7 May 2009
Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 4th floor New York, NY 10001
During the 1994 genocide, hundreds of thousands of Rwandan women were subjected to massive sexual violence by members of the infamous Hutu militia groups, known as the Interhamwe. Among the most isolated survivors are women who have borne children as a result of those rapes. Due to the stigma of rape and “having a child of the militia,” the women’s communities and few surviving relatives have largely shunned them. Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape brings together Jonathan Torgovnik’s remarkable portraits of these women and children, and their harrowing first-hand testimonies.
In February of 2006, Torgovnik traveled to East Africa to report on a story for Newsweek, coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the outbreak of HIV/AIDS. While in Rwanda, he heard an interview with Odette, a survivor who was raped during the Rwandan genocide and as a result of that rape, had a child and contracted HIV/AIDS. She described how her entire family had been killed and recounted the terrible abuse she experienced. Odette’s horrific story led Torgovnik to return to Rwanda to work on a personal project about women who, like her, were left pregnant as a result the militia’s heinous crimes. Over the next three years, he made repeated visits to photograph these women and their children, and record their heart-wrenching stories.
The exhibition on view at Aperture Gallery is comprised of thirty-one stunning individual portraits of these women with their children, accompanied by their testimonies—intensely personal accounts of what they have gone through, the daily challenges they continue to face, and their conflicted feelings about raising a child who is a reminder of horrors endured. The testimonies are presented in text panels and multimedia interviews projected in the center of the installation, produced by MediaStorm. The exhibition also features a large grid of sixteen portraits of the children, and a video interview with Torgovnik.
The accompanying book of the same title will be published by Aperture worldwide on April 7, 2009, coinciding with the fifteenth anniversary of the start date of the genocide, and a satellite exhibition of Torgovnik’s work will open in the lobby of the United Nations that same day. This commemorative event at the UN will include a solemn reading of testimonies of genocide survivors—including some of the women in the Aperture book and show—by UN officials, well known personalities, and students. Readers to be confirmed include the UN Secretary-General; the Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide; and the Rwandan Ambassador to the UN, a genocide survivor himself. Similar readings of survivor-testimonies will take place in cities all over the world, including Melbourne, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London, and Tokyo. The Reading of the Testimonies is a project of SURF Survivors Fund and Foundation Rwanda, supported by the United Nations, and the UN event will officially initiate the global remembrance.
This book and exhibition were done in collaboration with the Open Society Institute, Amnesty International, and Foundation Rwanda.
A version of this exhibition, sponsored by the Open Society Institute, is traveling to several universities in the United States, including Kniznick Gallery, Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, from February 23 to April 9, 2009; Bernstein Gallery at Princeton University, New Jersey, from August until November 2009; and Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, in 2010.
Jonathan Torgovnik’s (b. 1969, Israel) photographs have been widely exhibited and published in numerous international publications, including Newsweek, Aperture, GEO, Sunday Times Magazine, and Stern, among others. He has been a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine since 2005, and is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography School in New York. In 2007, Torgovnik won the National Portrait Gallery’s Photographic Portrait Prize for an image from Intended Consequences. He is co-founder of the non-profit organization Foundation Rwanda.
FOUNDATION RWANDA
An estimated 20,000 children were born from rapes committed during the genocide. Due to the stigma associated with rape, these children and their mothers have been severely marginalized by their communities and are not actively seeking help. No existing government or NGO programs have been created to support their specific needs. Foundation Rwanda was established to improve the lives of these children by 1) providing funding for their secondary school education, 2) linking their mothers to existing psychological and medical support services, and 3) raising awareness about the consequences of genocide and gender-based sexual violence through photography and new media.
