Image as Protest

Joy Gerrard, 'I dissent', Abortion Rights Protest (Foley Square to Washington Square Park, New York. June 24, 2022) 2022, ink on paper; image courtesy of the artist and the Cristea Roberts Gallery.

Top: Paula Rego, Untitled 8 2000, etching; image courtesy of the Cristea Roberts Gallery.

Bottom: Paula Rego, Untitled 5, 1999, etching; image courtesy of the Cristea Roberts Gallery.

VARVARA KEIDAN SHAVROVA REVIEWS JOY GERRARD AND PAULA REGO’S EXHIBITION AT CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY IN LONDON.

ONE DAY IN 1932, the Russian avant-garde artist, Vladimir Tatlin, walked out of his studio at the Novodevichy Convent in the centre of Moscow. He made his way to a field in the nearby countryside where he tested his bird-like flying machine, Letatlin. Tatlin’s aim was to offer the ordinary person unlimited mobility, to reclaim the skies and promise a functional everyday vehicle for the cities of the future. The artists of the Russian Revolution – Rodchenko, Malevich, Tatlin, Stepanova, and Lissitzky – saw the birth of human aviation and flight as synonymous with the birth of a new proletarian world order that demanded revolutionary, new art. The visions of the artists and the architects of the Soviet avant-garde were cast towards the skies, while the Russian Cosmists sought to free the human spirit from the binding pull of gravity.

One may imagine extrapolating the modernist adventure of flight into the present age, crowded with the competing technologies of surveillance. The global pandemic has exposed this ever-tightening grip of neo-liberal, surveillance capitalism that Shoshana Zuboff defined as “an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of people’s sovereignty.”1 The eyes of global surveillance penetrate earthwards as a panoptic instrument of control, stifling localised knowledge, referred to by James Scott as “state simplifications” that can only be challenged by the “knowledge embedded in local experience.”2 This sits in opposition to what Foucault described as “disciplinary power”, which permeates the societal body through constant monitoring of the populace.3

In her seminal oeuvre, Caliban and the Witch, the trailblazing Italian feminist philosopher Silvia Federici defines state-supported and church-endorsed oppression, and control of society, by citing the systematic abuse, enslavement, subjugation, and murder of

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)

Paula Rego, Night Bride, 2009, ethching and aquatint on velin arches paper; image courtesy of the Cristea Roberts Gallery.

Joy Gerrard, Abortion Rights Protest after Roe versus Wade falls, (Philadelphia. June 24 2022) 2022, ink on paper; image courtesy of the artist and the Cristea Roberts Gallery.

Joy Gerrard, Our Abortions’ (Brooklyn Bridge, New York. May 14 2022) 2022, ink on paper; image courtesy of the artist and the Cristea Roberts Gallery.