Daily Archives: August 1, 2017

Lit up faces are sneakily on display. Glowing blue, green, red, yellow, they can be seen peering out from behind gates, walls and doors, or from under roads and metal structures. They are trapped within boxes, with stories to tell passersby.

These faces represent all of us. All around the world, people face the same struggles, shoulder the same baggage and overcome the same problems. These faces are the portraits of real people that Ariela Wertheimer has preserved in her Light Boxes. Her exhibit, The Freedom to Let Go, on display at the 2017 Venice Biennale, encourages us to listen to the stories, but also to let go of the problems, break through the insecurities, and simply connect with other people.

People are people are people all over the world. They have the same problems, the same issues, and you can leave those problems here, Wertheimer said.

Wertheimers kind eyes and open smile radiate in the Alfa Romeo Exhibition Hall in Tel Aviv, where some of her Light Boxes and Rope Series paintings are hanging for the opening of a new Jeep car model. They asked her to show some of her work because its message connected with Jeeps marketing strategy: freedom, activity and letting go.

Life is not still, like we are not, she said. We are always us, but every day we are slightly different. We feel different things, we are a little different.

To show her work at the Jeep opening is a professional leap for Wertheimer, who only began displaying her work three years ago, in the Farkash Gallery in Jaffa.

She and her husband moved to Tel Aviv in 2013 after all of her five children had left home, and this motivated her to start working on her art more seriously.

Moving to Tel Aviv was a big movement in my soul, Wertheimer said, eyes sparkling. I always lived outside of cities in small places and suddenly Im in the big city and Im seeing all this street art. It was very moving. In the beginning I couldnt do anything there were so many good artists everywhere. I was quite paralyzed.

But she soon began photographing, painting and creating again, inspired by the people around her and their stories.

Im inspired from life, she said with a smile. I like to empower people, and help them if I can.

Wertheimer has a wide variety of life experiences to draw from. She is married to Eitan Wertheimer, the son of industrialist Stef Wertheimer and one of the wealthiest men in Israel.

While she always wanted to be an artist, she first studied to be an X-ray technician at Rambam Hospital in Haifa, and served in the IDF for 12 years. After her service, she began to wonder what she wanted to do with the rest of her life and came back to art. She still volunteers at Rambam Hospital in the oncology department and is dedicated to philanthropy movements for health and education. Now, she uses her art to help people.

I dont sell them very expensive, so that young people can buy them and begin collecting, she said. All of the money I receive goes to the Rambam Hospital Cancer Department.

She has a room at the Venice Biennale this year in a palazzo organized by the European Cultural Center, which provides additional exhibition venues so that more than one artist from each country can present their work. Wertheimer is excited to be in the same palazzo as Yoko Ono.

Her Light Boxes are, literally, boxes. Wertheimer prints black and white photographs on transparent plexiglass that become the front image, and paints a colorful acrylic portrait on wood for the back wall. The box is lit up with LED lighting, and with this box she tells a multilayered story of the person in the portrait.

If you come close, you can only see the front picture, she said, pointing at a green portrait of a woman peeking through from behind a photograph of the metal skeleton of a building.

But if you move far away from the picture, she said, walking away to view it from the opposite wall. You get much more depth.

This painting, on display at the Alfa Romeo Exhibition Hall, tells the story of a woman who built a shelter for women escaping domestic abuse. The building in the photograph is only a skeleton of what it will come to mean for the women it protects.

All of the stories she portrays are real; from real people, television shows or newspapers. While the boxes share these stories, they have also trapped the characters inside.

Each person and their own small or large prison, each with their own story from the past of present, Wertheimer wrote in her catalogue. Once we recognize our problem and embrace it, we will embed the railings as a basic element in our personality and come out of the experience reinforced.

There are 14 light boxes from Jaffa and 16 from Venice in her exhibit at the Biennale. The stories are truthful, uplifting, serious and beautiful. Independently, they tell personal stories, struggles and triumphs. Together they say, from Jaffa to Venice, we are the same.

These stories together form a unified world where power is measured in human frailty and strength all at the same time no matter where you are, she wrote.

While the Light Boxes may be Wertheimers main attraction, she has three other projects on display at the Biennale that connect with the theme of the Light Boxes. The Leaders is a series of three portraits painted behind photographs of palm trees. The trees represent the qualities of a leader.

Some people think they are strong. The palm tree grows everywhere; it doesnt need any special climate, and people can use everything in the tree, she said the leaves can be made into ropes, the trunk can be used for building and the fruit can be eaten or made into oil.

You take everything from [the leaders], she said.

But The Leaders also pose the idea that it can be dangerous when people are too dependent on their leaders.

There is a worm that goes into [the palm tree] and cuts the head off so there is only the trunk. Maybe it is an allegory of something that has happened in the world. Maybe some of our leaders dont have a head, she suggested with a laugh.

Wertheimer also has her own rendition of the The Last Supper; a landscape of 12 figures that tells the story of modern-day connection: the era of the cell phone. An era in which we know so much more about each other, but connect in person so little. An innovation meant for progress that has instead boxed us in.

We are trapped, depending on what we do with it, how much we use it and how much we want to be under Big Brothers eyes, she said. With the phone, with Facebook everyone knows everything about you.

The last piece in Wertheimers exhibit at the Biennale is a two-meter by two-meter chandelier, which hangs over the center of the room, titled The Institute of Marriage. It is made up of separate panels that hang from a plexiglass loop. Together the panels display the portrait of a man, but they are separated by several inches from each other.

Even in a relationship you have to give space, she said. As you walk around it you see a different part of the man. As time passes, you see more things. Over time, we discover something new in our partner.

Fragments of glass hang from the center of the chandelier, symbolizing the glass broken under the Jewish wedding canopy. The idea is that relationships are fragile but can be strong.

These four different projects all tell different stories of individuals, but they come together with a shared message: people are people are people.

While her art is making strides around the world, Wertheimer was never looking to be famous. She loves creating art and helping people. These two dreams came together in her art, and have attracted people from all over the world. In telling truthful stories, her Light Boxes, and the rest of her exhibit, do exactly what Wertheimer set out to do: empower people.

The Freedom to Let Go will be on display at the Palazzo Mora in Venice until October 31.

Share on facebook

See original here:

Empowerment through visual metaphor - The Jerusalem Post

Lantana was just a child when she was forced to drop out of school and start working so her family could afford her brothers school fees. In the impoverished areas of northern Nigeria where she lives, most bus stops are thronged with young girls hawking peanuts or other snacks from buckets balanced carefully on their heads, and so she joined them. The girls are easy prey for the older men who prowl these chaotic market places. Lantana thought she had found a protector in a bus tout who regularly bought up her daily wares, until the night he lured her into a dark alley.

Many adolescent girls in Nigeria can relate to at least one element of Lantanas story; giving up school to work for their family, abused by a trusted figure, not knowing where to go for safety. Unlike those girls, however, Lantana isnt real. Yet thousands of young women are calling a free number to hear more about her fictional life, and talking to mentors on the other end of the line about what they would do if they were her.

Lantanas story is one of four tales of young heroines being used in a radical new program to help adolescent girls in Nigeria navigate the challenges of growing up in a country where low levels of female empowerment, education and employment have contributed to early marriage, a stagnating economy and, some would argue, a concomitant rise in Islamist insurgent groups like Boko Haram.

The program, called Girls Connect , uses compelling stories like that of Lantana to reach young women from across a broad spectrum of Nigerian society through the kind of interactive voice recognition software that a bank might otherwise use to address consumer queries. But unlike a bank hotline, which is designed to eliminate the need for costly human interaction, the point of Girls Connect is to get the callers to engage with a call center representative who can help them process the information and use it in their daily lives. Its kind of like calling a toll-free bank line to get the latest foreign exchange rates, only to be connected with an agent who gives out personalized advice on balancing the household budget.

When callers dial in, they are offered a menu of four stories, with four chapters each, to choose from. Once they listen to the 2-3 minute dialogueperformed by professional radio actorsthey are connected to specially-trained agents, which the company calls Role Models. The 13 agents all women work off a standardized script that is designed to help callers internalize the lessons that Lantana and her fellow characters learn the hard way.

By asking questions such as Is this something that someone you know has experienced before? or If you thought a girl was put in danger by someone, what advice would you give her?, the Role Models can help girls work through problems they are currently facing, or might face in the future, in subjects ranging from safety to relationships, jobs or social media.

It's really challenging being a girl in Nigeria today, says Iveren Shinshima, who works as a Role Model. We talk about how she can stay safe while making money. How she can budget. How she can avoid cyber bullying. Whether it comes to making money, using social media or your relationship with your environment, the message we are trying to instill is that you are valuable as a girl.

The buzzing call center where these phone calls come in by the hundreds each day is far removed from the bus stops where girls like Lantana are forced to work. A five-story building crammed with uniform gray cubicles and staffed by fashionable Nigerian millennials in identical headsets, the iSON BPO International Call Center of Ibadan, in southeastern Nigeria, is the cornerstone of a booming new business in back-office outsourcing run by Indian entrepreneur Ramesh Awtaney . The center manages customer care lines for several Nigerian banks and telecom companies and now adolescent girls. The idea arose from a chance meeting between Awtaney and Farah Ramzan Golant, the London-based CEO of Girl Effect , an international nonprofit organization dedicated to ending poverty through empowering young women. Nearly half of iSONs 10,000 employees in Africa are women, and Awtaney wondered if there was a way to use his call center services to benefit Africas young women.

In the customer service industry we try and resolve your problem by putting you in touch with an automated machine. If the machine cant help, you are connected to an agent, Awtaney tells TIME. So the thinking was that we could replicate this process for girls in the context of giving them information on relationships, medical problems, education, and social media, etcetera. It was an unlikely marriage between the tech and the non-profit fields, with the tantalizing prospect of wide reachthe holy grail of cost effective girl-empowerment programs. What was interesting about it was how, like an interactive customer service program, Girls Connect can be scaled up very rapidly, Golant says. If you combine this content with toll free numbers, the impact can be huge.

Natalie Au, the global gender director for Girl Effect , says that unlike radio or TV shows designed to empower young women, Girls Connect can replicate the one-on-one experience of working with trained mentors, but on the much more accessible platform of mobile phones. When you have a chance to be asked questions about, well how did that story relate to your own life? theres a chance that before it goes out the other ear, youre going to have to stop and say, actually what would I have done in Lantanas situation? So youre much more likely to retain those key messages or skills rather than them being passively consumed and then forgotten.

To the Role Models, who field on average 230 calls a day, the value is not just in the lessons they impart, but in simply being present for adolescent girls at an all-too-familiar vulnerable point in their lives. Growing up I faced a whole lot of challenges that I know these girls will be facing as well, says Maureen Ijogo Onah, another Role Model. A lot of times teenage girls just want someone to listen to them, to talk to them, just to hear them out in whatever situation they find themselves in. For Hadiza Ibrahim, being a Role Model is a refreshing change from her usual call center work. The conversations are relaxed, quite friendly. Youre talking to a girl who trusts you. Its quite different from listening to an angry customer who probably cant get his Internet on.

Although Girls Connect content is currently only available in Hausa, the language of northern Nigeria, the response has been enormous, with some 42,000 calls over the first, month-long period of testing, despite limited advertising. Girls are calling in multiple time just to listen to the stories, and requesting specific Role Models by name.

Amina, 14, has listened to each story several times, she says, adding that she feels for the first time in her life like someone understands what she is going through. A street hawker herself, Amina says that Lantanas story doesnt go far enough in the program she is only robbed, not sexually assaulted, as is the experience of many of Aminas fellow hawkers. Still, she says, the story and the Role Models have helped. There are many girls that are hawking who have listened to this program, and they come to understand that even if something like this happens to them, they can go and tell their parents, as Lantana did, so that they can take action.

Each time Amina listens to a story, she says, she comes away with a new perspective on how to deal with a problem in her lifelike the time someone started sending her lewd photos via one of Nigerias popular text messaging apps. Even when I told him to stop, it was like I was instigating him to do more. But if I told my parents, they would blame me for being on social media in the first place. And when I told my friends they said it is normal, there is nothing wrong with it. That day she chose to listen to a Girls Connect story about a girl who used social media to start a business. When Amina spoke with the agent afterward, she told her about her issues. The Role Model told Amina how to block the man from her account, and helped her develop a strategy for avoiding cyber stalkers. If a girl in need of specialized help makes contact, for instance depression, suicidal tendencies, pregnancy or abuse, they are typically referred to aid organizations in their areas that can help them directly. The Role Models also encourage the girls to reach out to their parents or to the police when necessary.

Aisha Haliru, who runs a weekly empowerment program for adolescent girls in Kano, says the impact of the telephone mentorships has been transformative. Halirus classes provide the kind of safe spaces for girls that Girls Connect seeks to replicate on the telephone, but she can only reach a few dozen girls at a time. Girls Connect has the potential to reach thousands. And the need is even greater than ever, says Haliru, citing rising incidents of rape in Kano, and even the kidnapping of young women by the Boko Haram terrorist group.

Haliru now lends out mobile phones so her students can call Girls Connect on breaks between vocational training courses and lessons on personal hygiene. These days, a girl cant always confide in her mother, says Haliru, but with the Role Models, she will let it all out. She knows that the Role Model wont know her, or her sister or her mother. So when she has never been able to share with someone something that bothers her, and then suddenly she can speak freely with someone who understands what she is going through, its an amazing thing. I see the girls changing before my eyes.

ISON and Girl Effect plan to expand the Role Model trainings and content so they can launch the project nationwide, and eventually in other countries as well. The Role Models are looking forward to continuing their work mentoring a new generation of Nigerian girls, but for some their joy is tinged with a touch of regret. I truly, truly wish I had something like this while I was growing up, says Role Model Ibrahim. If I had had this kind of an opportunity to connect to a role model, I probably would have called her every day. And I probably would have made a lot less mistakes.

Excerpt from:

Dial 1 for Empowerment: The Toll-Free Number Giving Nigeria's Girls Advice - TIME