ABSTRACT
South African artist, Diane Victor (b.1964), has a history of creating art that engages with upsetting subject matter, particularly relating to the scourge of gender-based violence prevalent in South Africa. This chapter discusses the way she employs quasi-religious imagery to present these victimized women as martyrs. The focus is her meditative, processional installation work on victims of femicide, titled The Fourteen Stations (2018) referring to the 14 Stations of the Cross. In this work, ethereal portraits of victims are created using her unique technique of transparent smoke drawings on glass. These images are then projected onto the walls of an upwardly spiraling ramp, appearing as insubstantial as gently fading spirits. The chapter argues that Victor’s melancholic martyrs create an iconography of mourning, which approximates the purpose and effect of the Stations of the Cross in religious settings. It is suggested that her installation achieves this by evoking empathy and thus functions as a form of redress by acknowledging those who have been discarded by contemporary society.
