Nude female figures rendered in muted beiges, reds, and browns pervade the large canvases crowding the walls of the intimate Centre LGBTQI+ in Paris (centrelgbtparis.org). However, these bodies are not serene nudes that cater to the male gaze. They are marked by violence, death, and psychological pain. Hope Mokded’s 2020 solo exhibition Violence intime: Pour cela qui n’arrive plus! (Intimate Violence: So It Does Not Happen Anymore!) lays bare the intimate suffering of women that is often obscured by its relegation to the so-called private sphere, and offers ecofeminism as a way of rethinking violence against women through the public-private divide.1Mokded was born in 1988 in Gabès, Tunisia, and lives and works in Paris. She is a graduate of the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts, Tunis, and of the Faculté des Arts, Université de Strasbourg. Violence intime ran from March 2 to 30, 2020, and showcased works completed during late 2019 and early 2020. Thirteen canvases were organized on two large walls in the main room of the Centre LGBTQI+, a multi-use community space that features a food pantry and a film screening room. The show represents a departure from Mokded’s previous work, in which she used abstraction and the medium of engraving. In these works she explores the technique of figuration and the medium of acrylic on canvas. The resemblance between the figures in the paintings reveals the artworks as different scenes from a singular narrative: the story of women’s embodied pain and perseverance.Women and violence figure as prominent themes in the exhibition—specifically, violence enacted on women and self-inflicted harm resulting from psychological violence. Mokded attributes this psychological toll to the passivity of a patriarchal society that remains uninterested in women’s pain. Yet underneath such impassive disinterest flows a more purposeful silencing and dismissal of women’s experiences of violence, effectively containing such events within the private sphere. There they can be written off as individual problems rather than examined as evidence of systemic gender oppression.In a video interview Mokded noted that producing these works was cathartic. She mentioned that her art is a form of self-therapy through which she can reconcile her own experiences of gender-based violence and trauma. The cathartic use of her works contrasts with the viewing experience of the spectators, who may be disturbed by the violent subject matter and its explicit presentation. On this question Mokded recognized that her intent is to shock viewers in an attempt to counter the potential voyeurism of their exploitative gazes that pierce the intimacy of each scene. Thus Mokded seeks to implicate viewers by casting them as complicit bystanders who intrude in such intimate, violent moments but who take no action against the violence they witness. The tension between catharsis and voyeurism, and between artist and viewer, acts as a metaphor for the public-private divide while revealing that the private realm is a myth for women and “privacy” is a construction meant to conceal the abuse of women.Feminist theorists discussing the structure and function of the public-private divide in the late 1980s often argued that the public is the “masculine domain” because it is dominated by men. The regulation of women’s bodies in public, they noted, amounts to a kind of violence that aims to make the public sphere intolerable for women and to push them back into the private sphere. Yet they also observed that the private cannot be considered the “feminine domain”: women do not have dominance over the private sphere as men do over the public sphere. Catharine MacKinnon (1989: 191) argued: “The private is public for those for whom the personal is political. In this sense, for women there is no private, either normatively or empirically.” The construction of the private sphere as a feminine space in fact obscures women’s pain, suffering, and abuse. As Mokded’s intimate scenes illustrate, the private sphere is neither private nor free of gendered violence.Mokded’s idea of the private, however, does not correspond to typical conceptions of the feminine private as a domestic space that women may enter or exit. Through interwoven motifs of women, animals, and skulls set within both interiors and landscapes, Mokded reconceptualizes the private as a portable, malleable, and ubiquitous space that moves with women. By integrating elements of interior, exterior, nature, human, and animal, Mokded collapses the public-private divide. In so doing, she demonstrates that intimate violence is constructed as such by its environment, thus suggesting that a reconceptualization of the environment may counteract the privateness of women’s pain.The violence that Mokded illustrates in her artwork aligns with Mary Anglin’s (1998) description of structural violence. Accordingly, structures of domination produce violence through categories such as race and gender. Such groupings create hierarchies that legitimate inequalities and deny emotional and physical safety to subordinated groups within routine activities in both public and private spheres (Anglin 1998: 145). When asked about violence in different societies, Mokded mentioned that she moved to France seeking a “new way to survive,” leaving behind her own history of trauma in Tunisia. She hoped that French legal protections would translate into more defense against gender-based violence and cited France’s early adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) treaty in 1981 in opposition to Tunisia, which signed it in 2014. However, she later discovered that laws are only as good as the measures deployed to enforce them and that social ideas about violence and women often undermine these legal protections. As a migrant woman in France, moreover, she has experienced the convergence of racialized, xenophobic, and gendered violence. The “everydayness” of this intersectional violence is perpetuated through social systems predicated on sexism, heteronormativity, capitalism, and white supremacy.For Mokded, women’s suffering and death are constructed as private even as the conditions for these abuses are created by overlapping oppressions within systems that are very much public. She states that “nous en tant que femmes, nous cohabitons avec la violence” (we, as women, cohabitate with violence; my translation). Mokded expresses this sentiment in her art using a motif of skulls, which typically indicate memento mori, a reminder of the shadow of death that looms over even the most ordinary scene. This symbolism can be found in artwork from different geographies and eras, from Mexican culture to the European Renaissance to contemporary art. Yet in Mokded’s tortured images, the skulls—both human and animal—serve a different purpose. In placing skulls among scenes already rife with suffering female bodies, Mokded suggests that death is part of the female condition. At the same time, however, she emphasizes the resilience of those women who survive gendered trauma, even elevating some of them to saint status, denoted by halos.La mer rouge (The Red Sea, 2020), a significant scene that illustrates the overall narrative of the show, encapsulates the main exhibition themes by examining the relationship between women, death, and the natural world. Two female figures bookend this nearly four-foot by six-foot canvas. Between them appears a host of sea creatures, skulls, and oversized body parts, fossil-like, as if the painting depicts a cross section of excavated earth. Mokded explained that these fragments are what remains of other bodies, both human and animal, that did not survive this violent world. The female figures settle into a bloodred plane, foregrounding mountains and burned clouds in dark skies. The painting’s setting could be read as a landscape; however, the title indicates that the figures are floating in a red sea. The ambiguity of the figures’ geographic location and surroundings encompass multiple pairings in the natural world: land and sea, mountain and sky, land creatures and sea creatures, and life and death. The work acts as a metaphor for destruction, drawing a parallel between the destruction of women’s bodies and imbalances in social and material orders. As Mokded expressed, “It’s the story not only of two women, it’s an imbalance in the universe [created by] destroying [women and] women’s rights.”Death, nature, and femaleness recall themes of ecofeminism, which draws on material feminism in its focus on the importance of tangible forms and experiences. Ecofeminism was once dismissed by poststructuralists and socialist feminists, who interpreted it as associating women unequivocally with nature, and by writers like Paula DiPerna, who in 1993 critiqued ecofeminism as having “[grown] so holistic . . . as to render itself meaningless” (quoted in Gaard 2011: 34). Yet Greta Gaard has argued that reductive views of ecofeminists as “essentialist, ethnocentric, anti-intellectual goddess worshipers” and of environmental degradation as unrelated to sexism misunderstand the intersectional considerations of women’s oppression, environmental racism, and industrial agriculture (31–32). According to Gaard, ecofeminism asserts that when nature is constructed as feminine, it is necessarily understood as available to conquer (33). This parallel is visible in instances of concurrent colonization of land and people, whereby both are perceived as objects to be dominated. The dismissive “woman as nature” interpretation of ecofeminism exposes how the structures of oppression that shape humans’ relationship with nature center the human, even within feminist theory. Countering this theoretical anthropocentrism, Mokded decenters the human within a larger state of nature by placing the women figures at each side of the canvas. Their beige, brown, and pink skin, highlighted with white and gray, stands in contrast to the red water, thus drawing the eye to them. The dismembered arms, rendered in the same tones as the women, balance the lightness on either side of the image, while the oversized scale of the octopus and jellyfish, arms, and skulls give each of these figures weight nearly equal to that of the women. These strange proportions deemphasize the living women and propose that the dismembered bodies that share the same material realm are no less meaningful in this narrative of trauma and survival.Although this is an apparently bleak seascape, the paint strokes that move through the background of the image encircle the female figures in an embrace. In the caress of the red sea, the women—perhaps bathing, perhaps entombed—are suspended between life and death. Of the live creatures, both octopuses and jellyfish are multitentacled amorphous animals that, as Mokded emphasized, are adaptable and malleable. Among the skulls, human and bird crania appear in the same number as their corresponding figures: one bird skull for the black bird that perches near a figure’s head, and two human skulls for the two women. The changeability of some of the creatures and the parallel made apparent between the figures and the skulls each temper the anthropocentric and fixed boundaries between human and animal, and life and death.Mokded’s rethinking of the demarcation between such categories highlights various artistic influences on her work, both in style and in theme, such as Francis Bacon and surrealism. Mokded’s use of rich browns and reds as well as her deployment of skeletal forms and unsettling imagery alludes to Bacon’s oeuvre, while her juxtaposition of incongruous objects recalls surrealism’s strategies for disturbing the barrier between the conscious and unconscious mind.Violence intime exposes the artificiality of the gendered public-private divide through its study of violence suffered by women. In her work Mokded reveals that violence against women perpetrated by others and the violence that they enact against themselves are products of the same structures of dominance, notably patriarchy and heteronormativity, which construct women’s pain as a private experience. By invoking ecofeminism, the exhibition recontextualizes human violence in relation to both women and the natural world. It expands the notion of environment so that the natural world and the social world can be thought of as overlapping, even inseparable. In this reconceptualization of the environment, the demarcation between public and private fades, leaving a social world where the causes of and responsibility for women’s pain are exposed as societal rather than individual.After Violence intime Mokded further examined issues of violence and death in her June 2020 exhibition Colorful Trauma, at El Birou Gallery in Sousse, Tunisia. The works for the show were produced during the global lockdown period caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and took up themes of solitude and confinement, which for Mokded are another manner of death. In a video interview she described the trajectory of her upcoming works as continuing to explore multiple forms of violence through an intersectional feminist lens.