A Woman's Day - International Women's Day 2026
- 2 days ago
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Updated: 2 days ago
Dedicated to all women whose lives were impacted by the atrocities of wars.
International Women’s Day 2026
A young woman lies on the broken fragments of ruins. Her dress is torn; her shoes and a few personal belongings are scattered chaotically behind her. Her back faces us, bare and still, like the skeletal remains of the buildings rising in the background. Her negative truth is mirrored in the black-and-white positive still.
She is real. She was me.
I was lying on those broken fragments, performing my war-torn reality, accompanied by another young woman who helped stage the photographic shoot. When I rose from the ground, a man was walking toward me. He held a brick—or perhaps a large stone—in his hand; I cannot recall exactly what it was. His eyes, burning with intensity, were fixed on me. As he came closer, he lifted his arm with the intention of breaking the brick over my head.
A few seconds before his next move, the young me gently smiled at him.
The smile seemed to freeze him. Instead of completing his plan, he turned back in fear and began to run, disappearing among the ruins.
The shoot ended abruptly immediately after the incident. We gathered our belongings in haste and ran frantically away from that location.
The photographic stills that were taken preserved that moment—not as a report of where it was and what happened, but as a record of an inner truth: a reflection of the fragmented psyche of a young woman wandering in a shattered world.
There is a truth based on external facts, and there is a truth based on internal reflections of external facts. As an artist, I choose the latter. Art can never be fully planned; it is shaped by motions beyond the conscious mind’s control. It is not, in the words of Werner Herzog, the truth of accountants’ reports. The appearance of the 'real' aggressor in the scene was not planned, but it synchronised uncannily with the narrative and the surrounding landscape of destruction.
In a world ravaged by wars, the fragmented and threatened human psyche first seeks shelter. During the Second World War, the artist Henry Moore created the Shelter Drawings. Erich Neumann, known for his development of Jungian depth psychology, interpreted the archetypal patterns in these drawings. According to Neumann, when the civilised modern world collapses, an archaic one appears—an underground realm of caves to which people escape. They return to the Earth, taking shelter in the caverns of the Great Mother. Overpowered by the Earth, they become Earth again.
A descent into the depths of the Earth continues the scene of the Woman’s Day photograph, depicted through the lens of The Artist’s Genie.
Deprived by war and persecution, a young woman artist wanders through her ruined world. Isolated, she descends into the depths of the Earth, where a mysterious genie guides her to a temple in a cave. There she is overcome by the powers of creation and glimpses, through the eye of the genie, the shadows of war and its prisoners on the walls of the cave.
Emerging from the cave into the light of a beautiful day, the genie’s message echoes in the air—a whisper drawn from William Blake’s vision:
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to us as it is, Infinite.
These words echo across time and speak not only to artists but to all people. In times of destruction, imagination becomes a form of survival. The inner world turns into a refuge where meaning can be restored and where new visions of life can begin to emerge.
International Women’s Day is not only a day of celebration but also a moment of remembrance. Across generations and continents, countless women have endured the devastation of wars—displacement, violence, loss, and the silent labour of survival. Yet women have also carried memory, resilience, and the capacity to imagine renewal even amid ruin.
The young woman lying among the fragments of destroyed buildings is therefore not only a personal memory. She is an archetypal figure—a witness to the fragility of physical existence and to the enduring strength of the psyche’s imaginal capital.
“Artists need to create at the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy, ”stated the artist, Sherrie Rabinowitz.
The Artist’s Genie continues this stance through a journey into the imaginal where destruction and creation meet. Perhaps this is what art can still do in a wounded world: to descend into the ruins, listen to what remains alive beneath them, and help us imagine how we might rise again.
