For Our Freedom Years at the Town House

0 CommentsSaturday • November 5, 2011 • by anna-marie

London-based performance/installation artists Kerry Clark and Gemma Donovan have taken over the Town House, a beautiful old terraced building near Brick Lane for their joint exhibition For Our Freedom Years (26 October -11 November). They’ve used this disconcertingly domestic setting (it’s a kind of antique furntiture showroom with a lived-in feel) to explore popular perceptions of  femininity. Their collages, illustrations and photography slot in around the house’s permanent fixtures within the space and we found ladies’ faces poking out from underneath doorframes and scraps of paper inside glasses on the dresser in the house’s basement kitchen.

Through For Our Freedom Years Clark and Donovan ask how complicit we are in creating a female mono-culture through bad television and trashy magazines with a decent helping of dark humour and a seemingly vast visual knowledge of the history of media made for women. There’s a video installation with the artists posing as daytime TV agony aunts offering ‘helpful’ relationship advice and An Hysterical Case Study, a frame containing 19th century photographs of women labelled with medical terms placed next to screengrabs of Jeremy Kyle guests to gruesome effect.

FOFY makes for an unsettling experience managed by two young feminist artists that we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on.

[Pictured: a collage above the fireplace in the front room of the house]

Posted in: CULTURE, FEMINISM, JAZZY, LONDON

Tagged with: Gemma Donovan, hysteria, Kerry Clark, London