‘The great thing about my age,’ says Hannah Starkey, ‘and going through menopause, is that you leave the male gaze behind. And it’s really liberating. You can’t really sell me anything. And I am dangerous – because I can tell you the truth!”
A piercing, dangerous honesty and a fully emancipated female gaze are hallmarks of Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and The Art of Protest, a major exhibition at the South London Gallery, organized in collaboration with the V&A. This stimulating group show crosses continents and generations, seeking to connect ideas about representation and dissent and provide a visual manifesto for a fourth wave of feminism.
When Katayama was working as a jazz singer, a customer once shouted, “A woman who doesn’t wear high heels is not a woman.”
Belfast-born Starkey, 53, presents a trio of prismatic, large-scale ‘abstract portraits’. The works are part of a wider series commissioned to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement last year. The photos pay tribute to a generation of gentle activists, women who played an important role in the peace process in Northern Ireland. The three portraits show Anne Carr, who was part of the Good Friday Agreement team; Women’s Coalition co-founder Bronagh Hinds; and activist, actor and playwright Margaretta Ruth D’Arcy – who ran a women’s pirate radio station from her kitchen in Galway in the 1980s and was jailed in 1981 for painting protest graffiti.
Starkey grew up in Belfast during the 30-year Troubles. “I saw the power of women and their courage in speaking out,” she says from her studio in East London. “Women had the ability to cut through the shit. I wanted to remind the young generation how powerful women can be, with an example of what women in my own country have achieved.” It couldn’t be more topical: Starkey mentions research that shows that women involved in peace negotiations have a greater chance of being successful and lasting.
The portraits are made with simple props and colored glass. “I didn’t want to traumatize anyone with a camera,” Starkey explains. After photographing exclusively women for almost three decades, she is aware of how critical women can be about their own image. The photos were staged to make the women visible without subjecting them to scrutiny. They are also deliberately not the bombastic performances that we are used to in galleries and museums. “A good image appeals to everyone,” muses Starkey, whose portraits convey a sense of collective power. “It’s about what women can achieve when they come together.”
This feeling runs through the exhibition. There are pioneering artist activists – such as Nan Goldin, Guerilla Girls and Zanele Muholi, known for their advocacy on behalf of marginalized communities – alongside younger practitioners, such as Laia Abril, whose work is the result of intensive research and interviews with women who survived abuse and abortions; and Poulomi Basu, who works with women living in rural communities in India.
Among the younger artists in the show is Sethembile Msezane, who takes the idea of collaboration one step further, with live performance works. A photo by Msezane, called Chapungu: The Day Rhodes Fell, is a celebration of the day a statue of Cecil Rhodes was removed from the University of Cape Town. This is performed throughout the show and provides a dramatic entry point into the exhibition. In the work, a masked female figure dressed in a black leotard, with her outstretched arms adorned with elaborate wings, stands in a majestic pose on a plinth, rising from a crowd raising their phones in the air to capture the moment. in the background a statue is lifted by a crane.
This exciting image documents what Msezane calls an ’embodiment’ – a living work that took place during the removal of the statue of the former Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, after months of protests in 2015. Msezane, who appears in the work, embodied a Zimbabwean bird , Chapungu, who she said came to her in a recurring dream.
“The negotiations between myself and the bird in my body were very difficult,” the artist recalls, speaking by phone from Cape Town. “I was very scared. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, why I was there, or why I felt such an urgent need to do this work. But I knew it was the bird working through me, and I didn’t need to have all the answers. When I stepped onto the pedestal, my consciousness shifted – the person in that statue is not me.”
The grueling stretch lasted just under four hours. “When I came down from the plinth,” she says, “I was very tired and thirsty, and I was shaking.” In a second image, So Long a Letter, which also appears in Acts of Resistance, Msezane embodies a mother holding a crocheted baby made of hair. They stand next to Dakar’s African Renaissance Monument – a 55-metre-tall bronze statue that sits on top of a hill overlooking the capital. The statue has sparked controversy since it was installed in 2010. “The big man is holding the woman and their child,” says Msezane. “But the reality in many African countries is that women are the ones who maintain society, who work and who care. The statue does not symbolize that.”
We see Katayama walking confidently through dark industrial corridors in her bright red, extremely high heels
In the enormous sculpture, the baby points to the west. “Are we saying that the future of Africa lies in the West?” says Msezane, whose story is very different. Her crocheted child joins hands with the baby in the image, so that they appear to be pointing towards the ground. “The future is here, in Africa,” she explains. “We are the ones, as young people, who need to create a legacy to be proud of.”
Msezane does not call her work feminist: she identifies more with African knowledge systems and the new animism, a spiritual practice that posits a connection between animals, plants and people. “I suppose these are the ideologies that feel more robust to me as an African woman living and practicing on the continent.” However, she adds: “We don’t live in a vacuum – women’s issues and concerns are similar all over the world.”
Acts of Resistance aims to decolonize feminism and offer a more pluralistic idea of a women-led movement. It also shows the value of photography as a powerful tool of protest – quick and free to distribute, accessible anywhere and capable of reaching a global audience no matter what language they speak.
Mari Katayama started making self-portraits with hand-sewn objects she would make as a child. She took the photos to share her elaborate creations on Myspace and Mixi. Katayama now finds herself back in her small room at home in rural Gunma, Japan. There she is working on her largest hand-sewn object to date. “I am sometimes told that my work is a fantasy world or a stage consisting of my own dream stories.” She sighs. ‘I’m tired of hearing this. When I talk about feminism, I always think, “We have it – rights, equality and liberation – for sure.” But when I look at my life, I’m always disappointed that this isn’t the case.
Katayama, who has prosthetic legs, worked as a singer in a jazz bar as a student. One evening she was harassed by a customer who shouted, “A woman who doesn’t wear high heels is not a woman.” While high heels have been a polarizing symbol for feminists—the tired debate over oppression or empowerment—for Katayama, high heels weren’t even a choice. So in 2011, Katayama embarked on a mission to create a pair of high heels in which she could perform – and to design the prosthetic joints that would allow her to do so comfortably.
In 2022, her vision was finally realized with Italian luxury shoe designer Sergio Rossi. Two photos show the custom made ‘Mari’ shoes. Recently, a film called My Way was shot at another factory, Nabtesco in Japan, where the electronically controlled prosthetic knee joints are designed and made. In the film we see Katayama confidently walking through dark industrial corridors in her bright red, extremely high heels.
Acts of Resistance marks a turning point in the evolution of feminism: an approach that is more inclusive, less Western-oriented and still with a lot of fire in the belly. By joining these forces to be reckoned with, the show is a space to observe and highlight how women remain vulnerable and continue to fight. It is also an opportunity, Msezane believes, “to understand where things are going wrong and where things could go right”.
• Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and The Art of Protest is at the South London Gallery, London, from March 8 to June 9