(Image of Jolly’s “Threads of Testimony” taken from Tang Museum’s website)
The Payne Room of the Tang Teaching Museum was filled with students, faculty, and Saratoga residents sat in slanted rows of multicolored chairs as yellow leaves grazed across the windows of the room behind the audience. As the remaining minutes of daylight slipped away last Tuesday, Oct. 22, Saleema Waraich, an associate professor of art history at Skidmore, introduced speaker Melia Belli Bose.
Bose smiled as she stepped up to the microphone and chronicled bits of her experience as an art history and visual studies professor at the University of Victoria. A screen projector displayed a photograph of a crumbled building engulfed in flames, which sat below the bolded talk title--Made in Rana Plaza: Dilara Begum Jolly’s Garment Factory Themed Art.
Bose’s talk focused on the unfair treatment of workers in the profitable garment industry through the lens of art history and activism. She introduced Dilara Begum Jolly, a Bangladeshi artist who creates textiles, murals, and multi-media exhibits that express experiences of female garment factory workers.
A majority of the world’s garment factories are located in southeast Asian countries like Bangladesh, where employees are paid well under a living wage. News headlines covering garment factory disasters in countries such as Myanmar, Cambodia, and Bangladesh have saturated media outlets over the past decade. Jolly has been sparking conversation about the expectations and mistreatment of women in her country and across the globe through her multi-dimensional art .
Since Jolly’s art speaks to underlying issues of structural exploitation of garment factory employees and a lack of responsibility that authority figures often have, Bose tells us that some of the artists’ pieces have been controversial.
Threads of Testimony is one of Jolly’s well-known exhibits in which the artist created a dinner party atmosphere complete with plates, cutlery, and glasses, which were placed on a long wooden table. The items were compiled from loose hairs, smashed lunch-boxes, and various pieces of rubble found at the collapsed Ran Plaza site — the deadliest factory accident to date, which happened on April 24, 2013 near the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Rana Plaza was an eight-story commercial building that carried European fashion retailers, a bank, apartments, and garment factories. During the event, Bose elaborated how the fatality killed 1,135 people, many of whom were not found beneath the layers of rubble and cement.
“The theme of female invisibility saturates many of Jolly’s pieces,” Bose said. When Threads of Testimony went on display in the Bengal Art Lounge near Dhaka in 2014, Jolly invited the factory management of Rana Plaza and affiliated garment factories to view the exhibit.
The photographs, videos, stitches, and symbols within the piece were meant to hold a direct line of managers accountable. “Loose regulations make it easier for factory management to cut corners because many buildings do not have permits or safety guidelines,” Bose relayed.
The expectation of “fast fashion” in the Western world has dominated much of the labor workplace for years. As people within large corporations and government officials continue to trade resources and mass produce products, “exploitation of factory workers becomes more intense,” Bose explained.
The work conditions and circumstances that many factory workers live in are not typically visible until a catastrophe occurs. Images depicting the aftermath of the Rana Plaza disaster continued to flood the screen behind Bose as her lecture came to a close.
As Jolly viscerally expresses in her art, our world has a long way to go with human rights abuses. The ramifications for Rana Plaza employees and their families play out today as little change is made to labor regulations. A part of this awareness must concern several peoples’ own role in creating lightning-speed demand for cheaper products.
Despite these crushing circumstances, Bose explained that we can still prevent future factory disasters by starting with ethical treatment of factory employees. The road to valuing the human quality of life over commodities seems endless. But artists like Jolly capture people’s emotions and narratives that ignite action, stitch by stitch