August 09, 2025 - September 14, 2025
White River, South Africa
Click here to view: Majak Bredell Exhibition Catalogue
Opening words by Casandra Jacobs, Gallery Manager, White River Gallery.
THE WORK— A MIRROR TO THE PATH
A celebration of Majak Bredell’s 80th birthday at the White River Gallery
BACK STORY
I was born two months before the end of World War II. By the time I went to grade school the structures and strictures of a narrow puritanical way of life was solidly in place. In the conservative Free State dorp where I grew up, women and girls were supposed to serve and uphold Calvinism’s patriarchal puritanism. We could not think for ourselves, could only speak when spoken to, and could not own property or open a bank account. Sex before marriage was the worst sin. In the popular culture of the Hollywood movies of the 1950s an enforced blindness towards sexuality showed married couples sleeping in single beds separated by a nightstand yet, at the same time created the hyper-sexualized “goddesses of the silver screen” with their torpedo-pointed bras, wasp-like waists, ruby red lips, and alluring postures.
Captured by the male gaze, a woman first belonged to her father, and then to her husband, but always to the dictates of misogynistic media and culture. All of this was presided over and enforced by church, school, and conforming parents who wouldn’t dare think against the grain. This was the state of the world in which I became a young woman. To grow up always being afraid of doing wrong, sapped the creative energy of becoming.
There were no role models of women who could freely be authentic, only pre-prescribed roles. During my late teens I always felt a fractured sense of self. My developing body had to have its natural curves controlled by a “step-in” girdle. I had to reject and throw away parts of myself in the service of puritanism’s body loathing and obsession with sin. In my early 20s I did some conscious throwing away of my own. I threw the baby of religion out with the bathwater of faith. It would only be later, during my research and reading of Jung and the spiritual feminists that I began to realize how religion and the gender of god affected women.Without a god who looks like us we were denied a holistic sense of self...
- Excerpt taken from exhibition catalogue, access full write-up in the catalogue above.
Majak Bredell,
August 2025
