Nancy Spero: Torture of Women

Artistic ingenuity coupled with boldly feminist and political intent, Torture of Women is a public cry of outrage and a nuanced exploration of the continuum of violence. While it vociferously protests torture, it also speaks to the solitary, individual experience of pain. While it decries the particular victimization of women, it also condemns the abuse of all power no matter who suffers at its hands. And as Torture of Women gives voice to what is often undocumented, officially denied, or left unspoken, it reveals the presence of the silent consensus which allows the violence to be state-sanctioned and eternally mythologized.

It is a work of art that, thirty years after it was made, has become even more powerful as it bears witness to the continuing practice of torture and state-perpetrated violence. Torture of Women is ever radical, raising provocative and urgent questions that cross the borders of art, politics, feminism, and human rights.

Torture of Women is a series of fourteen panels, totaling 125 ft. in length, that took Spero two years to make. On vast fields of space, Spero collaged startling imagery drawn from ancient mythology with hand-printed and typewritten words: first person testimony by women detailing their experiences at the hands of their abusers culled from Amnesty International reports, news items on women missing or dead, definitions of torture from the 20th and 13th centuries, as well as the retelling of violent Sumerian and Babylonian creation myths, such as Tiamat disemboweled by Marduk in order to create the heavens.

Siglio´s publication translates Torture of Women into nearly 100 pages of detail so that the entirety of the work (with legible texts and vibrant color reproductions) can be experienced with immediacy and intimacy. The book was conceived not to simply catalog the work but to create a space in which the reader can fully engage it. The design of the book encourages multiple acts of reading Torture of Women as an innovative and polyphonous narrative, as a feminist disquisition, as a register of political protest and outrage, and as a fierce and enduring work of art.