Born in Cape Town, South Africa, 1952
Lives in Holland
Training:
1984: MA[education] University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
1992:M.ed: University of the Western Cape
Recent group exhibitions:
Cape Town, South Africa.Triennal.
Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
1993: "Southern Cross", Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam,The Netherlands
Sandra Kriel married a Dutch citizen and settled in Holland in
1994. The move marked a radical shift in her life and work. While
her earlier works focussed on racial and gender politics, her
recent work in Holland explores how these issues impact on her
personal life.
The powerful image of genital mutilation, depicted by means of
sharp thorns bursting through velvet cloth, is central to the work
entitled It Won't Hurt. Genital mutilation is still widely
practised in several societies. Unlike male circumcision, it is a
process of mutilation and severance whereby women's bodies are
damaged and their ability to experience fully their own sexuality
removed. Such brutalising of women's bodies and the denial of
female sexuality is perpetrated in order to exert control over
women in the most heinous way.
In this work Kriel uses genital mutilation as a metaphor for
conveying the wounds she feels. Having left her homeland for a
foreign country, she speaks of experiencing the wounds of
physical severance from her motherland and mothering
friends (1). Moving from the position of a single, independent
woman to that ofwife and (step)mother overnight, she has been
forced to grapple with her feelings of dependence and
interdependence. Much of this is experienced as wounds of
disempowerment, of daily conflict and disharmony (1) - not what
an unsuspecting bride-to-be might expect from her imminent
marriage.
It Won't Hurt extends the artist's concern with abuses perpetrated
against women. The work coheres around the artist's need to
involve herself and, by implication, the spectator in the process
of understanding and transforming the self and society.
(1) Kriel, S. Letter to the Emma Bedford, 7.9.1994.
Works:
"It Won't Hurt"
Velvet and Thorns (1994)
It Won't Hurt was selcted by curators Pitka N'tuli and Colin Richards
for the exhibition Siyawela: Love, Loss and Liberation in Art from
South Africa on show at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery
from 21 October1995 - 14 January 1996 as part of Africa 95.