Revered cinematographer and journalist Elisa Iannacone premieres her globally acclaimed and highly provocative exhibition – “The Spiral of Containment: Rape’s Aftermath” – to Joburg’s Constitution Hill from Saturday, 14 May until Thursday, 30 June.

The Spiral of Containment: Rape’s Aftermath is a multimedia immersive and experiential exhibition featuring 24 poignant portraits of rape survivors from across the world. The exhibition is curated for installation in the chilling 25 Isolation Cells at the bottom of Number 4 Prison. It includes text and digital links to the oral testimonies of rape survivors.

Iannacone says on her website that “The Spiral of Containment: Rape’s Aftermath is a travelling art exhibition that highlights the impact of rape through photography, an immersive soundscape, and a hologram”.

Composed of 24 photographs, soundscapes, installations, and one holographic projection (self-portrait), the suite of photographs on exhibition feature a rape survivor in a fictionally constructed portrait — magical-realist in style. The images draw from each subject’s recollections of their harrowing experiences, reframed, and reworked into layered statements of empowerment, agency, and identity.

She says the exhibition uses art to express trauma. “Each image is the visual translation of a rape survivor’s personal story, a collective outcry of shared experience,” she notes.

​​The portraits on display were photographed in a range of locations and countries across the world, including seven in South Africa. The 24 images are “colour-coded” into 24 primary, secondary, and tertiary colours in the colour wheel, with her image, the 25th, contained in a monochromatic hologram.

The project and the method of its composition evolved from Iannacone’s own experience of rape and therapeutic recovery. A respected foreign correspondent, Iannacone funded the project, which took five years to complete, from her work in war zones.

Iannacone was born in Mexico and studied BFA Film Production at York University in Canada as well as an MA International Journalism degree at the City University in London. She has worked as a photographer, filmmaker, journalist, foreign correspondent, and human rights documentarian on six continents. Her work has been published by the BBC, ​Newsweek, and National Geographic. It covers an assortment of news themes, including conflict zones and humanitarian crises such as the Rabaa massacre, domestic violence in Syrian refugee camps in Iraq, and cyclone Idai in Mozambique.

“My career as a cinematographer and photojournalist came to a sudden halt after I was sexually assaulted in 2011. After the assault, I felt like a shadow of a person, without much direction, and barely any capacity to navigate the earth,” she explains.

Through art therapy, Iannacone says she started to process her assault creatively.

“I reached out to other people who had been raped to explore the images that spiralled in their minds. The result became a project that aims to impact people around the world.”

The Spiral of Containment: Rape’s Aftermath exhibition opens at Constitution Hill on Saturday, 14 May at 11 a.m. It will run throughout June, Youth Month. The South African premiere, which marks the commencement of a global tour of the exhibition on both the art fair and heritage circuits, is the first public viewing of the exhibition since its UK debut at The OXO Tower Bargehouse in London in 2018.

The exhibition programme incorporates workshops focusing on rape, legal procedures, and justice, as well as using art as testimony