A common thread of brutality

IN one black-and-white image, a young woman sits over a table spread with photographs of family and friends who were killed in the Rwanda genocide.

In another, an older woman, holding her orphaned grandchild, sits in a refugee camp shortly after fleeing from Darfur to neighboring Chad on foot.

These are two of about 40 photographs on display in the exhibition “Rwanda / After, Darfur / Now: Photographs by Michal Ronnen Safdie” at the Skirball Cultural Center. By looking at the aftermath of the “ethnic cleansing” in Rwanda in 1994 and the plight of 18,000 refugees who fled the Darfur region of Sudan in 2004, the show seeks to inform viewers on the devastation of the two tragedies.

The horror of such violent acts is a difficult topic to present to a museum audience. But Skirball officials say the need to confront such issues underlies the center’s mission to make the world a safer and more civilized place through the arts.

“You have to see the photographs of Rwanda and Darfur as lives being diminished,” says Uri D. Herscher, founding president and chief executive of the Skirball Cultural Center. “This exhibition is a living documentary of what’s happening.”

To document the events in central Africa, photographer Ronnen Safdie made two trips: one in 2002, the other in 2004. She says she was compelled by a sense of social responsibility -- her mother, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was saved by a Hungarian Jew, an act that Ronnen Safdie says served as an “everlasting torch” for her to reach out to those in need.

“After Rwanda I could not believe that we didn’t do anything about it. I could not just sit at home after what happened. Since my only language is the image, I thought with what little I could do, I would do it,” she says, speaking from her home in Cambridge, Mass.

In 2002, she traveled to Rwanda with Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” to document the village tribunals called gacaca (pronounced ga-CHA-cha).

Eight years after Hutu militiamen had killed more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, the specter of what happened lingered (and still does) throughout the villages. The photographs show prisoners waiting to be put on trial, memorials in the areas where much of the carnage took place and the pained faces of the survivors as they look upon their assailants.

Witnessing the victims confront those who murdered their loved ones was particularly difficult for Ronnen Safdie.

“People were talking about the most intimate, horrible moments of their life where their children or husbands were butchered and they were forced to do horrible things. That was totally overwhelming,” she says.

The exhibition contains black-and-white and color images. For Ronnen Safdie, the power of the color photographs lies in the contrast between the vibrancy of the imagery -- lush landscapes and the colorful dress of the people -- and the atrocities that the people experienced and described at the trial.

“Rwanda is a beautiful country, and the people are beautifully dressed in bright fabrics. It actually looked very festive at first, and I didn’t know how I would capture something so horrible among all this color. On the other hand, this is the color of what these people were butchered in, and that’s what I wanted to show.”

In 2004, Ronnen Safdie found herself returning to Africa with Power, this time to the Chadian border to document the refugee camps where at the time 18,000 people, two-thirds of them women and children, fled Darfur.

Once there, Ronnen Safdie was shocked by the barren landscape and the sparse personal belongings among the refugees.

In one photo, two women are carrying water back to camp, surrounded only by sand. Covered in their orange and green wraps, both walk with their heads high, maintaining a look of dignity amid the bleakness.

The exhibition doesn’t show explicit images of violence from either conflict. Instead, Ronnen Safdie sought to document the individual stories of the victims.

“I met people in different stages of genocide. In Rwanda, they are still suffering incredibly eight years later but differently from people who just barely carried themselves through the desert. To me, the devastation of what people are left with as a result is just as horrible as the violence itself,” Ronnen Safdie says.

Maps, news coverage and documentaries put the images into a broader context. During the exhibition, the Skirball is holding lectures and other programs about current events in Sudan.

Herscher challenges visitors to the Skirball and Americans in general to respond by supporting local orphanages and voicing their concerns to politicians.

“In the past, we used the excuse that we weren’t aware of the depth of cruelty because of the distances that separated us geographically. We didn’t have the media that we have today,” Herscher says. “Is this another story that Americans watch on their televisions and read in their newspapers, only to be forgotten the next day? Passivity is no longer a choice.”

Along with the public programs and information, the Skirball has partnered with American Apparel to sell T-shirts, with proceeds to support elementary schools in Darfur. It’s an effort Ronnen Safdie is pleased about since, she says, “education is the only hope we can give people.”

But Ronnen Safdie can’t help but recall her sadness as she left the refugee camp in Chad.

“There is no tomorrow or next week when there’s a genocide,” she says. “We have to deal with it right now.”

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‘Rwanda/After, Darfur/Now’

Photographs by Michal Ronnen Safdie

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A.

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, except noon to 9 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Oct. 1

Price: $6 to $8; students and children 11 and younger, free

Info: (310) 440-4500, www.skirball.org