From an African Score | 19 As part of Oxfam’s ‘Cut Conflict Campaign’, Arms & the Woman (1998), curated by Jenny Matthews, included photographs from Uganda in a wide-ranging survey that was the earliest Brunei exhibition focused on women’s experiences of war. Sadly, these issues have not become less urgent. Face_WSLOT (Women See Lot of Things) (2006) curated by Meira Asher for the Bodylab Art Foundation, was the first part of a multi-media art installation and educational project created with three female ex-child combatants in post-war Sierra Leone elucidating the experiences they underwent and had to confront as fighters, sex slaves and labourers during ten years of war.
Fig. 21 - Meira Asher Women See Lot of Things
In the same year, Heroes of our Time: Rwandan courage & survival (2006) presented the stories of four survivors of the Rwandan genocide as told to the Survivors Fund (SURF). Brainchild of Rwandan Mary Kayitesi, the exhibition contextualized their stories in a multimedia presentation highlighting their memories and fortitude, as well as the causes of the ethnic violence. Not every exhibition has been elaborately installed. In 2005, Tim Hetherington, who was to die covering the Libyan conflict five years later, asked that his photographs of Liberia’s civil war were simply stuck to the walls of what was then the Brunei café when his documentary on the Liberian civil war was previewed in rough cut at the first European Conference of African Studies. He specifically did not want them framed as art objects.