Jenevieve Aken
Nigeria, b.1989
The Masked Woman 6, from the Masked Woman Series
2014
Photography
Artist’s collection
Jenevieve Aken’s Masked Woman 6 features her in the dining room of an unspecified home, with a meal ready as she faces the viewer. The mask visually represents the stigmatization placed on women who stray past their expected boundaries, but also the power embodied by the woman who defies gender norms, and the threat she poses to an established system. Aken finds that that the mask “makes the body anonymous, [so] it can stand in for any woman in society.”(ArtAfrica 2014: Interview with Jenevieve Aken). Women in Nigeria face an uphill battle – they are constrained by both social and legal pressures, finding that women are represented by only 24.3 percent of Nigeria’s judges. (Ashiru 2007: 328). Despite these challenges however, Aken wanted this character to be a “super femme fatale, choosing to achieve pleasure and contentment through self-fulfillment that not dictated by the subservient role as a house wife or defined through a man’s affection.” (Aken 2014: The Masked Woman). The “solitary lifestyle” depicted defies the expectation that a woman in Nigeria’s rights (property wise or suffrage wise) ought to depend on the size of her contributions to a male-dominated world (Panata 2016: 177). Aken creates her work with reaching women throughout Nigeria, across various cultural and geographic groups.
Aken, Jenevieve. “Interview with Jenevieve Aken: Exclusive content from snapped magazine’s Special Re-Launch Issue!” ArtAfrica. November 2014. https://artafricamagazine.org/interview-jenevieve-aken-snapped-magazine-relaunch-issue/
Aken, Jenevieve. “The Masked Woman.” (2014) Jenevieve Aken. https://www.jenevieveaken.com/untitled-gallery
Ashiru, M. O. A. “Gender Discrimination in the Division of Property on Divorce in Nigeria.” Journal of African Law 51, no. 2 (2007): 316-31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27607991.
Panata, Sara, and Heloise Finch-Boyer. “Campaigning for Political Rights in Nigeria: The Women Movement in the 1950s.” Clio. Women, Gender, History, no. 43 (2016): 175-85. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26242549.