‘Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape’
with her daughters Amelie and Inez
This exhibition, which has been previously seen at the United Nations, will be at the Pollak Theatre Gallery in West Long Branch during March and April. Hours are Monday-Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
“Intended Consequences” brings together award-winning photographer Torgovnik’s photographs and powerful stories of the women who are the rape victims.
The exhibition is made up of 25 individual portraits of the women with their children accompanied by their testimonies — intensely personal accounts of the daily challenges they face and their conflicted feelings about raising a child who is a reminder of horrors endured.
According to a press release from the university, during the 1994 genocide, more than 100,000 Rwandan women were subjected to sexual violence perpetrated by members of the Hutu militia groups. Among the survivors, the most isolated are the women who have born children as a result of being raped. Due to the stigma of rape and “having a child of the militia,” the communities and few surviving relatives of these women have largely shunned them, the press release explains.
In February 2006, Torgovnik traveled to East Africa on assignment and while in Rwanda heard the testimony of Odette, a survivor who was raped during the Rwandan genocide and as a result had a child and contracted HIV/AIDS. She described how her entire family had been killed and recounted the terrible abuse she experienced. Odette’s horrific story led Torgovnik to return to Rwanda to work on a personal project about women like her, who were the victims of the same heinous crimes and who were left pregnant as a result.
Over the next three years, he made repeated visits to photograph the women and their children and record their stories.
Torgovnik’s photographs have been widely exhibited and published in numerous international publications.
He has been a contract photographer for Newsweek since 2005 and is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography School in New York. In 2007, he won the National PortraitGallery’s Photographic Portrait Prize for an image from “Intended Consequences.”
He is co-founder of FoundationRwanda (www.foundationrwanda. org), a nonprofit organization that supports secondary school education for children born of rape in Rwanda.
Aperture, a not-for-profit organization devoted to photography and the visual arts, has organized this traveling exhibition. The exhibition is made possible by support from the Open Society Institute, Amnesty International and Foundation Rwanda.
For more information, call 732-263-5759 or visit www.monValentine mouth.edu/arts.
