Women, inclusion and rights
– The notion that there's only room for one woman at the top [in hip hop] must be eliminated, artist Stella Mwangi declared at the Arts for Young Audiences Norway seminar Cultural Cooperation with the Global South.
The Art of Balance (Balansekunst) participated in Arts for Young Audiences Norway and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs' seminar on Cultural Cooperation with the Global South, in the session "Women, inclusion and rights".
Art of Balance chairwoman Guro Kleveland used her minutes on the rostrum dismantling the well known arguments about quality and equality as contradictory concepts.
– Art may or may not in itself be about gender, but art does not exist in a vacuum – art is always created, presented, understood and analysed in a context, said Kleveland.
Why is gender equality in music and the arts important? Because it leads to richer arts, Art of Balance chairwoman Kleveland suggested.
Artist Stella Mwangi and Judy Ogana from the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, were among the other participants in the session.
– We have to start a conversation that not only reveals discrimination and suppression, or where we identify structural exercise of power in others, but where we also clarify the privileges that benefit ourselves. The purpose is not only to move responsibility from the subordinated ones and the discriminated against to the privileged ones, but to highlight that privilege embodies the same structural causes as discrimination, suggested social anthropologist Thomas Walle in conversation with Judy Ogana.
– Women's representation in the arts must happen in an including, not excluding way, said GoDown Centre's Judy Ogana.