ABSTRACT
Engaging with Diane Victor's Wise and Foolish Virgins, a triptych that the artist made in 2008, Karen von Veh draws attention to the ways in which its representations of St. Catherine, St. Agatha and the Virgin Mary can be interpreted as a comment on the horrors of gender-based violence in South Africa. Von Veh points out that violence against women occurs in South Africa with considerably greater frequency than in most other countries. She supports interpretations that explain this violence as the outcome of systemic factors – the pervasiveness of patriarchy in ways of understanding the world – rather than as an aberration resulting from social turbulence and upheavals. Von Veh's interpretation of the Wise and Foolish Virgins triptych highlights this point. Referring directly to the role Christianity and the state have played historically in the regulation of women and their sexuality, Victor's transgressive images are revealed to expose and question grand patriarchal narratives and their impact in perpetuating unequal relations of power between men and women.
