Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975
As she speaks, she names her own oppression -
In Semiotics of the Kitchen Martha Rosler begins her demonstration of kitchen utensils in alphabetical order in the style of a seemingly straight TV feature. Her physical interaction with the objects is unapologetically sudden and violent. In her subtly anarchic and comical presentation of the tools, in fact, Rosler addresses the aggressivity that is inherent in archetype of the "Woman in the kitchen" – from outside as well as from inside. Each display is a thinly veiled gesture of frustration with the language of domesticity as the kitchen becomes grounds for resistance and change.
Keywords: domesticity, feminism, violence
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Stephen Willats, Living with Practical Realities, 1978
In her work Stephen Willats tackles the ways in which people construct their world in relation to the social or physical constraints that are put upon them. Living with Practical Realities was realized by the artist in direct collaboration with an elderly woman who lived on her own in a tower block in Hayes, West London. The work centres on the isolation of the elderly, physically and socially symbolised by the tower block. The visual references are directly located within the tower in which she lived and represent different aspects of her tower-bound life. Similarly the written references are from the tape recordings made with the woman, and the three problem situations: her physical situation, her economic reality, her social reality. The panels contrast the institutional reality of the tower block with the day-to-day reality of her life. Each panel asks a question of the viewer, a question that is not only particular to the woman’s situation, but of universal relevance concerning the elderly, and in the lower section presents self-organised strategies for countering the isolating deprivation of the tower block’s physical reality.
Keywords: isolation, alienation, urban agglomerations, strategies for survival
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Sheba Chhachhi, Shahjahan Apa - Staged Portrait set-up, Nangloi, Delhi, 1991
Seven Lives and a Dream is a group of nineteen black and white photographs taken between 1980 and 1991. They include both staged and documentary images selected from a body of work by photographer and activist Sheba Chhachhi that spans decades of engagement with, and participation in, the feminist movement in India. The women’s movement in India had been galvanised after a notorious rape case in Delhi in 1978. Chhachhi’s sister was a founder-member of an activist group, and Chhachhi herself became involved both as an activist and a chronicler. Chhachhi’s images became a record of the struggle and were used for posters and pamphlets on issues such as dowry, as well as for street theatre and protests.
The feminist movement spanned class boundaries, and Chhachhi decided to re-examine her role and the power dynamics involved in her representation of the women whose personal struggles she had witnessed and supported. For Seven Lives and a Dream, Chhachhi reshot individual portraits of a select group of women, asking each to take control of the process and decide how they wanted to be portrayed, and encouraging them to choose objects of personal value to develop a more complex and staged image. Chhachhi has called this ‘an invitation to perform the self’ (Sheba Chhachhi, unpublished artist’s statement sent to Tate curator Nada Raza, June 2013). The power of the gaze, acts of representation and questions of agency or individual choice are central to gender politics.
Keywords: body, feminism, representation, protest
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Graham Sutherland OM, Devastation, 1940- A House on the Welsh Border, 1940
The painting is one of a series of paintings of bomb-damage in South Wales made by Sutherland in September and October 1940 and was amongst a group of seven gouaches and one oil sent by the artist to the War Artists Advisory Committee on 24 October of that year. The romantic echoes in the painting creates an interesting contrast with the modernist forms of the house and draw clear parallels with the classical ruins. The building, dismembered by the war, loses all its functionality and all its power. It reveals itself as a fragile structure, turning into a symbol of destruction and impotence.
Keywords: modernism, industrial archeology
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Martha Rosler, If You Lived Here, 1989
If You Lived Here is a multi-part exhibition project presented at Dia Art Foundation, New York in 1989. The project consisted of three exhibitions on housing, homelessness, and architectural planning presenting work by artists, filmmakers, homeless people, squatters, poets, writers, community groups, schoolchildren, and others. Moreover, it included four forums featuring the participation of artists, activists, advocates, elected representatives, academics, and community members. Local participation and collaboration were emphasised as the main working tool as they were both functional to the artist’s dissolution and the inclusion of the public in the project’s communicative processes. In building the various exhibitions Rosler aimed at producing social space, foster direct social interaction and participation. In the project, homelessness is one of the core themes and the most interesting as it embodied the problems of an unbalanced state and its perverse urban social policies. In the exhibition and in some of the works of that period it is possible to notice how homelessness was a very relevant topic for the artist. According to Rosler, the definition of homelessness itself had to be reconceived, including all those people who, despite having a material roof over their heads, were actually forced to extremely precarious and discontented living conditions, in a constant state of jeopardy.
Keywords: gentrification, real estate speculation, protest, homelessness
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Margaret Harrison, Homeworkers, 1977
Homeworkers is the central piece of a multidisciplinary project documenting the situation of non-unionised women doing manual work at home. Margaret Harrison made this work to denounce the working conditions of women in Britain, who were often treated as second-rate labour and encouraged to perform low-pay manufacturing jobs. The artist advocated political action and strong political discourse as the only effective means of fighting for workers’ and women’s rights. Harrison had begun to engage with feminist action in the late 1960s. In 1970 she formed ‘London Women’s Liberation Art Group’ offering working women the chance to develop and learn art skills and in 1972 she joined the Artist’s Union and became active in setting up the Women’s Workshop. Experimenting with social and political subject matter through the use of painting, in this work form and content are one and the same thing. At once a political banner, a symbolic painting and a social study, it represents the everyday life of a working woman alongside advertisements for make-up and data on the history of workers’ movements. In Homeworkers the home is depicted no more as a safe space but a space of constraint and material exploitation. Through the weight of reproductive work, women are limited in their autonomy and freedom of choice while being pushed to adhere to external models.
Keywords: domesticity, feminism, reproductive work, fair wage, protest
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