Artist Statement
Hot News / Taaza Samachar
Hot News / Taaza Samachar (Hindi for “fresh news”) is a video performance based on local newspaper reports of sexual violence from August-November 2003. The video was created in the early phase of Blank Noise which examined public attitudes towards kinds of sexual violence ranging from ‘eve-teasing’ to rape.
Eve Teasing is experienced by women on the streets of their cities everyday (comments, stalking, touching, groping, flashing at, rubbing against, whistling, staring at body parts) and is dismissed as a joke, as something boys do for ‘fun.’ Information about rape is communicated via news reportage and often distances the recipient of this information from the event itself.
The narrative created in the process of reporting rape in the news media perpetuates a victim-perpetrator stereotype. Because we expect to read headlines that say “woman raped,” the news fails to outrage us until soon enough another rape “story” shocking enough to be part of the headlines is reported. Only a few of the reported rapes become newsworthy. Some stories live in public memory, taking the form of gossip. This kind of narrative reinforces the image of women as victim and men as a species to be feared. It is in the repetition of reports that Hot News / Taaza Samachar questions both the passive consumption of receiving and delivering information about sexual violence.
