Zulfa Abrahams is an artists who has taught in the English, Women’s and Gender Studies and Anthropology Departments at the University of the Western Cape (email: zlfabrahams@gmail.com).
In much documentary photography that depicts starvation or hunger, the face of hunger (usually feminized) is often almost expressionless in the sense that hungry women are seen as totally destitute and almost entirely lacking in human complexity because of their desperation.
Zulfa Abrahams, a painter who teaches at the University of the Western Cape, represents highly expressive women’s faces. In this painting she conveys the ways in which hunger, especially for women, is linked to complex emotional and psychological states that may include a sense of responsibility for others, deep feelings of shame, and profound anger towards and about the local, domestic or broader situations that cause individuals’ hunger
