RUBY RUMIE AT RAYO MUSEUM, COLOMBIA
With regard to the increase in studies on gender, at the level of social sciences such as letters and arts, the Museo del Rayo de Colombia presented on Saturday, July 14, a sample of the Colombian artist, Ruby Rumie. This consists of 3 projects realized between different stages of the artist, but all conducted by the thread's conductor of the genre.
Below, the text by Miguel González, curator of the museum and the exhibition.
There is an increasing tendency in gender studies, these have led to examinations and warnings about the condition of women and their discrimination in the domestic sphere and in the different labor fields.
Ruby Rumie (Cartagena de Indias, 1958) works with an observation of the role of women in marginal performances. Her works are the result of a fieldwork that includes not only the knowledge of certain problems but the negotiation with the protagonists that become the main visual input in the works.
The Museo Rayo will exhibit three projects dated in 2009, 2014 and 2016. The first one is Lugar Comun (Common Place), a collaborative work with Justine Graham, where domestic employees and housewives are matched by the white shirt and the neutral background. For two years, one hundred women between 19 and 95 years of age were contacted, evidencing through this photographic installation the questioning of the work relationship, altering the idea that we have of the portrait and shaking social stereotypes neutralizing the identity of the registered roles.
Gender violence is the axis for research on battered women. Rumié proposes a therapeutic and healing exercise. The symbolic mourning as an exit to redeem the pain and help the duel. Hálito Divino (Divine Breath), her second exhibit, shows 100 women invited to deposit the energy of their breath in a liberating ritual with a great symbolic load. The white vessels as votive objects containing feelings torn.
The third project, Tejiendo Calle (Knitting Street), exhibits images of seventy-year-old women who work as street vendors in the city of Cartagena. They offer fruits and carry basins in their heads where their products are concentrated. For this project they are portrayed without this addition and dressed in white, in order to strip them of the "exotic" elements with which they are regularly identified and, instead, returning their dignity as persons.
The work of Ruby Rumié focuses on offering us essentially bodies that with their presence in the pyramid social order, question their own condition and ask about the performance where they have been led. They invite the viewer to be interpretive, reflective in different ways of communication.
MIGUEL GONZÁLEZ
