Exhibition “Images of Power”, Textile Biennale, Museum Rijswijk, Netherlands. Curated by Diana Wind.
The war in Ukraine has again brought a centuries-old crime against women and also men to our attention. In the past century, stories about rape, abuse and terror only made the news afterwards, sometimes even years later, because the suffering that a war brings had to be dealt with in its entirety, perpetrators and victims had to find their place again. An example is the 70,000 ‘comfort women’ who were forced to work as sex slaves in army and navy brothels during the Japanese occupation of the former Dutch East Indies between 1942 and 1945.
Now too, during the Russian war against Ukraine, female and male soldiers are confronted with abuse of power. The women are called ‘field wives’, and although they serve in the Russian army, in a supporting role or at the front, they are forced into prostitution, abused and humiliated by officers. The women who found the courage to resist are doomed to be perpetual migrants or dead. In the press, it has also been reported that male soldiers are subjected to this. In the installation Field Wives (2023), Gluklya demands attention for the war crimes along with the language of war, which is trying to describe it. For example, civilian victims are depersonalised because they do not have a name but become a number (BK27PO) in the press*.