Shreya Arora
Post - Scarred
Imagine this: You're a 7 year old girl, visiting your cousins, aunts, and uncles on summer vacation, like you do every year. Only, this year will be different. Post-Scarred visualises a journey too many girls experience even today; being sent to their homelands for a holiday, only to undergo a procedure they are too young to fathom- female genital cutting.
Conceptually, this experience is narrated through the eyes of a survivor, in the form of a postcard, which children often send back to their families from vacations. These accounts take excerpts from Maryum Saifee's interview, published by The Guardian. Through a series of 3 postcards, using the stitch commonly used during the procedure, the artworks aim to denote the different kinds of scars FGC can leave on a person, far beyond the physical.
While physical scars heal over time, the silence around FGC makes it difficult to address the emotional and mental scarring caused by the procedure.
"Like other forms of gender-based violence, FGM/C is a manifestation of power and means of controlling the sexuality of women and girls. In recent years, many countries have passed laws to criminalise the practice of FGM/C. Yet, it is an extraordinarily difficult crime to prosecute. Laws alone are not enough. For there to be a sustainable end to this practice, there has to be a radical culture change from the ground up, that promotes zero tolerance to any and all forms of excision."
- Maryum Saifee