No Safe Spaces! Feminist Satire - part 1
Introduction
The featured pot, photographed with me, is Postcard from the Caliphate, 2017. It is one of 23 pots and 2 huge drawings that were packed into giant crates and taken to Warsaw, last week. Yesterday they arrived at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland's most prestigious gallery, for my first ever solo show outside the UK. The Exhibition opens on July 7th, evening, and runs from July 8th- October 1st, Tuesday - Sunday, 11am-7pm.
Some Background
No Safe Spaces! is also my first museum show in 13 years. None of the pots in this exhibition have been shown in a public space in the UK. They’ve been seen in private galleries – some very private indeed - but never in funded public spaces. All have bumped into one kind of ‘sensitivity issue’ or another. Read the excellent and well informed introduction by Josephine Bartosch here.
The show covers my three main areas of satirical and critical interest: religious extremism, the sex-trade, and gender ideology. All three are forms of ideoglogical extremism. All deserve rigorous mockery, attack, or critique.
Three pots attacking religious extremism and one to celebrate Iranian women fighting it.
'Postcard from the Caliphate,' is a satirical response to a report I read of a British Jihadist who went to live in the Caliphate and wrote a tourist guide. My merry-go-round pot represents the cheery postcard he might have sent to the folks back home. It depicts the main protagonists: Assad, Putin, Khaamanei are in key positions on the the roundabout - Putin stirring with the wooden spoon - and Erdogan and the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas are riding alongside. The Saudi kings keep watch, and various unsavoury characters in Britain dance to whatever tunes they call.
Woman Life Freedom: an Iranian revolution
Woman Life Freedom, 2023, remembers the first few months of the Iranian 'women's revolution,' if this is the right expression. The internal images record, in monochrome and sketchy brushwork, some of the most widely shared images of the actions taken by women in Iran: the hair cutting in public, the dancing round a bonfire of hijabs, and the White Wednesday protests from 2017, when young women first started to remove their hijabs in public. This, arguably, was the start of the revolution.
The portrait image of Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish woman who was killed by the basiji for showing some hair, is also among the internal images. Her death in 2022 changed the intermittent rebellion of 2017 into a mass movement and brought it to international attention. Other women are remembered there too and a short video lists the names of all the women and girls killed since the beginning of uprising.
Woman Life Freedom is both a memorial and a celebration.
The Jugs
***ck the Sharia is a record of protest by French Algerian women outside a mosque in Paris and How the Prophet was Driven to Drink depicts a furious prophet swearing at his followers and telling them to get their act together - only in rather more colourful language. Well you try bring a prophet! Who would want followers like that? Or like any of those characters that sign up to extreme ideological positions?
I don't know if France has Sharia Courts but Britain certainly does. I am vehemently opposed to this which is why I made the jug. I'm an advocate of one law for all. Special laws for brown people used to be called Apartheid. I think they still should be and duly consigned to history.
