Sex work is a subject that is too often – especially in popular culture – presented in a one-dimensional way. This new exhibition at the ICA aims to do something different. It features work by 13 artists selected from an open call to address global sex worker experiences, and offers a multi-dimensional perspective.
And the artists selected couldn’t work in more diverse media – there are installations, huge linocut prints, video-game technology, embroidery and film and video – and each project adds a layer to a complex, absorbing show. The organisations behind it are the Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement (SWARM) – the goal of the global sex workers’ rights movement is full decriminalisation as “the best available legal model for protecting the rights of sex workers” – and Arika, the political arts organisation that supports projects addressing social change.
The exhibition is one node within a network of Decriminalised Futures projects: accompanying the art here are audio excerpts from panel discussions on sex work and topics connected to it – you can listen to them in the gallery, should you have time, or outside it, by scanning a QR code. But they drive home one of the show’s key points: that the sex workers’ rights movement intersects with other societal struggles, including poverty and homelessness, migrant, disability, queer and trans rights, and much more beyond. In the texts around the show, the curators Yves Sanglante and Elio Sea quote the African American poet and activist Audre Lorde’s famous maxim: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
The multi-issue precariousness of sex workers’ existence is driven home early on in two narrative works. A comic book, Unsustainable (which you can take away), written by Danica Uskert and illustrated by Annie Mok, is a Hollywood-based love story of a sex worker and an actor, each of whom is “flesh for sale, a performing monkey” who performs “physical acts onscreen for the amusement and derision of an audience”, but set against a background of spousal and substance abuse, homelessness and violence.
A video-game which acts as a kind of choose-your-own-adventure through sex work by Cory Cocktail, meanwhile, can have happy or desperate outcomes. Khaleb Brooks’s remarkable life-size linocuts are self-portraits, where Brooks’s eyes meet our own, and address their blackness and transness and inevitably, in this context, how they’re consumed and objectified.
Perhaps the most confrontational works in the show are Tobi Adebajo’s three videos, set in curtained booths. “What are you actually doing here?,” the voiceover asks. With images of a figure, sometimes moving, perhaps dancing, erotically, as well as sensual images of fruits being eaten, among much else, Adebajo directly addresses decriminalisation: “It’s all screaming for change,” the voiceover says, while reflecting on the police as “state-sanctioned violent systems”, how “society is a dystopia”, and also hailing the solidarity and community of the sex worker rights movement. “Eat the rich!” is among the repeated demands.
This, along with two works in the upstairs galleries, reflects the breadth of cinematic language being used by video artists. Chi Chi Castillo and May May Peltier’s Stone Dove sits between reportage and performance documentation – with sex workers discussing shame, empowerment and acceptance, accompanied by images of the women, among them beautiful choreographed sequences in a lush garden with a neo-classical fountain.
In This Is Not for Clients (2021), the video artist Yarli Allison and poet and sex worker Letizia Miro have collaborated on a two-screen work, using Allison’s characteristic fusion of real footage with virtual imagery. It’s the most explicitly sexual work in the show, and also among the most complex in its mode of address and the breadth of issues it surfaces. Miro’s voice reflects on her journey as a sex worker, her shifting identities. “We both seek a compliant gaze,” she says, making us increasingly aware of our position as a voyeur into this world. And her insistent refrain – ”That’s why I am a good whore” – grows increasingly sinister as the images unfold.
This isn’t an easy show, and neither should it be. But there’s an admirable balance of art and activism that reminds me of the gallery’s 2020 exhibition War Inna Babylon, about the UK’s long history of systemic racism. Across these two shows, the ICA has finally found something it’s been searching for a while – a distinctive voice in London’s crowded contemporary art scene.
