Painful Cake | Uploaded by Pontus Raud
Sweden Cultural Minister eats “N--ger Cake”.
News Rescue | April 18th. 2012NewsRescue- Sweden once again tops the misogynistic and racist charts with a tasteless event in which the Swedish cultural minister sliced and ate from the “N--ger cake” as pictured.
DailyMail- Sweden’s culture minister today faced furious calls to resign after she was pictured cutting a ‘racist’ black cake designed like an African tribal woman.
Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth had appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm when she was invited to cut the cake which was designed like a naked African woman.
The Swedish minister cut pieces from the black cake, which had blood-red sponge and was designed to highlight the issue of female genital mutilation.
Despite the intentions of the bizarre cake, however, critics described it as a ‘racist spectacle’, and demanded Ms Liljeroth resigned for participating in the ‘tasteless’ event.
The 'artist' who made the cake appears above. Many regard it as an attack against Blacks, Women and humanity.
The Association for African Swedes said the cake was a crude racist caricature which ‘makes a mockery of racism’.
Kitimbwa Sabuni, a spokesperson for the group, told Swedish news agency TT: ‘To say that you did this for a good cause only makes the mockery of people who are victims of racism and of circumcision worse.’
Mr Sabuni told a Swedish newspaper Ms Liljeroth’s participation in a dubious event with cannibalistic overtones showed her ‘incompetence and lack of judgment’.
NewsRescue- Mixed race Tetti describes racism in Sweden:
I heard from my sister (who’s also in a mixed race relationship) that she sometimes does get comments (funnily enough mainly from the Turkish community) directed at her and her kids. If she gets any comments from Swedish men, it’s usually ”Javla blatte alskare” (for those of you who are not familiar with that phrase it’s something along the lines of "You bloody “n….” lover basically, not very nice!)
Makode Linde, the artist who came up with the cake, had placed his own head at the top of the cake and said it had been misunderstood.Sweden's Cultural Minister eats the N--ger Cake
The black cake, part of an exhibition on World Art Day, was intended as part of the artist’s project illustrating degrading stereotypes of black people through history.
Liljeroth, whose photograph cutting a piece of the cake was widely shown in Swedish media, said she understood why people would be offended by the incident.
She said in a statement: ‘I was invited to speak at World Art Day about the freedom of art and its right to provoke.
‘And then they wanted me to cut into the cake. I don’t review art, but I can very well understand that this whole situation was misunderstood.’" SOURCE
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A Note From The Gull
I am going to deliberately spin this into a tale of a triumphant, Anancy-like, black, Swedish artist, a consummate trickster who sat in his studio one day while the broadest, wickedest grin slowly cracked his face. "Aha!" he thought, "I will capture white Swedish people eating black cake. Art will imitate colonial/neo-colonial life but this time the feasting will be televised!"
We have been told that this cake was supposed to have been created to highlight the problem of female genital mutilation, so many have been left scratching their heads, if not wanting to scratch out the artist's eyes, over what was eventually produced. Could it be that the artist in fact cunningly killed twenty birds with one stone?
Did this black artist set the scene so perfectly for white people to be recorded devouring, genitals first, a cake portraying a stereotypical, black, tribal woman, while its live head [actually the artist's head] screams in pain every time another slice is carved out? Could he have known that the real icing on his artistic effort would be the documentation of this cutting and grinning and eating. Did he envision the ensuing recordings of the black female's cries of agony eliciting only laughter from the white carvers and eaters? Could this be viewed instead as a brilliant reversal of the role of cannibal assigned most often by the popular insider to the unpopular outsider-other? Or is it an uncovering of the fact that "cannibalism" of any sort is universal wherever the powerful [the too comfortable beholder] and the weak [the immobilised object] collide? Did anyone understand that the revelations were not just in the display of the work but in the manner in which the audience interacted with the work?
Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth actually said that she understood why people would be offended by the incident. She understood? Really? When exactly did this epiphany occur? Was it before she grinned and initiated the clitoridectomy or after the howls of protest reverberated around the world. In another photo of the event she appears to be feeding the cake's head a piece of its own body. Was this choreographed? Was the message that becomes forever the caption for this image "Let me cultivate in you a taste for self-mutilation or mutilation by others." or "Let them eat cake! or "There ain't no pain that a little cake won't cure"
By the way, the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm where this work was displayed had to be closed two days after the exhibition because of a bomb threat. According to the reports it was unclear if the bomb threat was related to this particular exhibit but someone was obviously not amused by something that this museum had allowed.
So, would you have eaten this cake? If you were the Minister of Culture and you had been brought face to face with this and asked to cut it or comment on it, what would you have done? Although most of us will never really know what was in the artist's mind when he created this, can the success of a work be also be judged by the volume of thought and discussion which it generates? Does the beholder's response, whether negative or positive, add value and does it become an integral part of the work?
Richard Bolai, may you rest in peace, that is, if you are not busy, as I suspect, continuing to BE Art elsewhere, but where are you tonight? I would have loved to ask you for your thoughts. Something tells me that you would have understood this work completely.
"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.We have been told that this cake was supposed to have been created to highlight the problem of female genital mutilation, so many have been left scratching their heads, if not wanting to scratch out the artist's eyes, over what was eventually produced. Could it be that the artist in fact cunningly killed twenty birds with one stone?
Did this black artist set the scene so perfectly for white people to be recorded devouring, genitals first, a cake portraying a stereotypical, black, tribal woman, while its live head [actually the artist's head] screams in pain every time another slice is carved out? Could he have known that the real icing on his artistic effort would be the documentation of this cutting and grinning and eating. Did he envision the ensuing recordings of the black female's cries of agony eliciting only laughter from the white carvers and eaters? Could this be viewed instead as a brilliant reversal of the role of cannibal assigned most often by the popular insider to the unpopular outsider-other? Or is it an uncovering of the fact that "cannibalism" of any sort is universal wherever the powerful [the too comfortable beholder] and the weak [the immobilised object] collide? Did anyone understand that the revelations were not just in the display of the work but in the manner in which the audience interacted with the work?
Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth actually said that she understood why people would be offended by the incident. She understood? Really? When exactly did this epiphany occur? Was it before she grinned and initiated the clitoridectomy or after the howls of protest reverberated around the world. In another photo of the event she appears to be feeding the cake's head a piece of its own body. Was this choreographed? Was the message that becomes forever the caption for this image "Let me cultivate in you a taste for self-mutilation or mutilation by others." or "Let them eat cake! or "There ain't no pain that a little cake won't cure"
By the way, the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm where this work was displayed had to be closed two days after the exhibition because of a bomb threat. According to the reports it was unclear if the bomb threat was related to this particular exhibit but someone was obviously not amused by something that this museum had allowed.
So, would you have eaten this cake? If you were the Minister of Culture and you had been brought face to face with this and asked to cut it or comment on it, what would you have done? Although most of us will never really know what was in the artist's mind when he created this, can the success of a work be also be judged by the volume of thought and discussion which it generates? Does the beholder's response, whether negative or positive, add value and does it become an integral part of the work?
Richard Bolai, may you rest in peace, that is, if you are not busy, as I suspect, continuing to BE Art elsewhere, but where are you tonight? I would have loved to ask you for your thoughts. Something tells me that you would have understood this work completely.
Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.
Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare
