women that was, and still is, common practice within many cultures, religions and societies.4 This offers a disturbing perspective in which the only route that women can take out of oppression is to flee, to escape, to vanish.
‘Image as Protest’ is an exhibition running at Cristea Roberts Gallery in central London until 4 March. It brings together works by Belfast-based artist Joy Gerrard and the recently deceased, Portuguese-born, Grande Dame of British feminist art, Paula Rego. The exhibition loosely oscillates between fight and flight modes – the modus operandi that women have adopted globally in order to not only survive but to persevere, resist, defend, object and remain defiant in the face of oppression and mortal danger. Rego’s etchings depict women engrossed in their own grounded worlds; they are the real fighters and survivors, undergoing often dangerous backstreet abortions. Rego’s women are contorted in physical and psychological pain, yet the artist offers the viewer hope by witnessing and standing in solidarity with her heroines, as they lie on makeshift beds in grotty rooms.
Gerrard’s position, or at least her pictorial viewpoint, is less explicit, and often veiled by scrupulously detailed depictions of massive crowds of protesting women, presented at miniscule scale and delivered through intensely detailed, monochromatic drawings, executed in Indian ink on paper. Gerrard’s images are drawn from media reports, newspaper articles and TV footage of women’s protests around the world including a women’s march in Dublin, the vigil-turned-protest for Sarah Everard in London, and a massive demonstration in support of the 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling on abortion rights in America. Gerrard’s portrayal of the crowds, always seen from above, avoids direct engagement with the emotional charge present at these protests, offering a levitating, disembodied, bird’s eye view, akin to the perspective of surveillance mechanisms, remote algorithms or the camera-eye of a drone. It is the artificiality of these vantagepoints that make Gerrard’s work sleek, curious, and attractive, as they draw the viewer into their territories of abstraction.
Seeing Rego’s works next to Gerrard’s is a disturbing yet somehow satisfying experience, but one that ultimately highlights that very little has changed in the last 50 years. Spanning the individual to the multitude, the public to the domestic, the ground to the sky, ‘Image as Protest’ conveys an ongoing global fight for women who are oppressed, persecuted, hunted down and killed on a daily basis in Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, in Europe and in the US. In order for women to regain basic human rights – such as safety, education, and bodily autonomy – we must remain vigilant and continue to scrutinise the motives and actions of law makers and law enforcers.
Varvara Keidan Shavrova is a visual artist, curator, educator, and researcher. Born in the USSR, she lives and works between London, Dublin, and Berlin. She is currently a practice-based PhD Candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. varvarashavrova.com
1 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019)
2 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977)
4 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004)
