What constitutes evidence for a gender-based crime? What do we need to “see” to be convinced of the accounts of women? For an issue that is as “invisible” as it is pervasive, Nieves Mingueza repurposes the archive, to make us see that which often occurs in private spaces, or evades the commonly accepted measures of evidence. One in Three Women builds from the alarming yet familiar statistic, that one in three women experiences gender-based violence in her life.

In manipulating the image ‒ piercing through faces of women with rage, constructing context with texts drawn from UN reports, implicating domestic interior spaces as scenes of a crime and objects as weapons of violence ‒ Mingueza asks us to reorient our gaze. What if, instead of looking at the women, we examined the oppressive environment that controls their existence. It doesn’t matter what she wore, where she was at which time of day, whether alone or amongst a crowd, she could be one in three women. Using overlay as strategy, Mingueza focuses on the looming patriarchal landscapes that rob women of their individual identities ‒ the inflicted violence may vary by degrees, but is unified in the unjust structures that enable it.

Within photography’s historically fractured relationship with evidence, and amidst the fraught connection between evidence and cases of gender-based violence, Mingueza’s methodology lays bare the deficiency of the image. In its capacity to obscure as much as to make visible, this collection of images asks us to shift our approach toward how we read and decipher family archives. It functions within a tension ‒ between the information we have, and the narratives that are rendered invisible; between the demands of justice, and the inadequacy of consequence.

Tanvi Mishra