Inked

Week 23: Notes

Adorning the skin, permanently or just for special occasions or a performance, this programme shows how different women from different cultures feel about tattooing, stitching or painting their bodies and  touching on issues of tradition, self-empowerment and pleasure.

The Butbut Kalinga of the Philippines is a tribal society numbering 15,000 people. Hand-tapped tattoos called batok have a long history as Whang-od Oggay, the oldest tattooist of this tradition reports. Isobel Varley, (1937–2015) had over 200 designs on her body, the first acquired when she was 49 years old. Angela Hovak Johnston, a Canadian from the Kitikmeot Region is the founder of the The Inuit Tattoo Revitalization Project and helped revive the old tradition of kakiniit, a practise colonialism tried to erase. Alisha Gory is a tattoo artist who lives in New York. Practicing her art was not possible in South Korea where she was born since it is forbidden there as well as in Japan, as Mindy Tan, a Singapore-born documentary photographer reports. Body piercers Brittany Slam and B. Girard talk about how being tattooed is perceived in a male dominated world. Henna is a dye prepared from the henna tree and, since ancient times, it has been used to dye skin, hair and fingernails as temporary ornamentation in North Africa, India and the Arabian Peninsula, and, as Ghanaian Saraunia shows it is still being used today. Painting one’s body can be a form of self-empowerment as Anne-Claire Fleer’s model, a dancer, actress and ‘anorexic warrior’ demonstrates and as German-French visual artist Rotraut Klein-Moquay notes in her account of the time she worked as a ‘blue paint’ model for French visual artist Yves Klein, (1928 –1962) whom she later married.

The programme ends with Becky, who covers her face and neck tattoos as a social experiment and experiences just how differently people react to her, giving us a chance to examine our own attitudes…