Celeste Coetzee gave The Gallery at Grande Provence in Franschhoek a little more than they’d agreed on last week. Her Unisa Final Year Student Exhibition was axed from The Gallery after she went a bit too far by posing nude and tearing pages from a Bible.

Coetzee was exhibiting her final year work and was aiming to depict the suffering of women in a patriarchal society. She’d initially agreed to pose topless and wearing just a skirt, but didn’t.

Instead she arrived at the opening dressed in traditional Voortrekker clothing and looked “scary,” according to The Gallery’s curator, Carina Bekker.

Then she changed things up a bit and posed completely nude on Wednesday and Thursday last week. She sat amongst her old-fashioned kitchen setup, adorned with potatoes and messages like: “Wives, respect your husbands, submit to your husbands,” behind her.

She’d also used the exhibition to criticise evangelist and Faith Like Potatoes author Angus Buchan.

Enough was enough for Carina Bekker:

As a gallery, that’s not the message we want to portray. She’s very negative to the old Afrikaner, Christian patriarchal system. She was trying to be the vulnerable woman suffering under the system. But women are not under that system anymore.

An incensed Bekker didn’t beat around the bush about the tearing of pages from a bible either:

I am completely against tearing pages out of the Bible. I will not tolerate that she tore pages out of the Bible.

Bekker continued that Coetzee had gone from one extreme to the next, and it was because of the “inconsistencies” in her work that her exhibition was cancelled.

Coetzee said she would reply to emails soon.

[Source: TimesLive]