Please be aware that this exhibition and talk consider challenging and potentially disturbing subject matter.
“So much pain goes covered, and I want your photographs to provide an eye, another way of opening what is felt in isolation.”
~ Sarah Mwaga, anti-FGM/C activist, 2016
In From Where Loss Comes, Pradip Malde presents a series of photographs of women confronting the traditional practice of female genital mutilation / cutting / circumcision (FGM/C) in Tanzania.
The photographs included in the exhibition work to honor the women portrayed, and, as Sarah Mwaga asked, to bring into the open some of their experience.
For Malde, the example these women offer demands that we consider how the boundaries of community are constituted—especially the violence inflicted and the loss incurred in navigating between the personal and the communal and between sacrifice and survival.
Pradip Malde has taught photography at the University of the South since 1989. His work is represented in the collections of the Princeton University Museum, Princeton, New Jersey; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.
This project has received support from a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2018), an Appalachian College Association Faculty Fellowship (2018-19), a Faculty Research Grant from the University of the South (2017), and from Joanna and Paul Ware.
