Filling the space of the gallery, we hear a montage of female voices describing their daily lives. They detail the return of what seem like nineteenth-century living conditions: the violent effects of the British government’s policies of austerity – which have pushed a disproportionate number of women into poverty since the financial crisis of 2008 – and the ‘hostile environment’, which has fuelled anti-immigrant feelings in the UK. Forced into unpaid care work, or struggling with a punitive benefits system, precarious housing conditions, racism and detention, the women turn to protest. The experiences of police intimidation that follow, underlines the violence with which those in power continue to respond to struggles for equal rights. The networks of care and solidarity that they create, enable them to change their situations and challenge the status quo.

Accompanying the women’s voices is a series of posters on the walls of the gallery, showing bold black-and-white slogans based on their words, like newspaper headlines.

Hold Hold Fire, 2019

two-channel video installation

The camera follows the actions of a group of contemporary women as they engage in a self-defence workshop. The video dwells on the bodily and collective tactics women can learn to resist everyday violence as well as police aggression, and how they can take ownership of the situation. The two-channel film, focuses on some of the sophisticated techniques of self-defence and collaborative methods of feminist pedagogy that have been developed and practiced by feminist groups, especially in women’s spaces and activist organisations. We see the women engage in a learning process in which they struggle to overcome the taboos surrounding female aggression and anger. As they rehearse movements and practise Jiu-Jitsu throws, the participants build up to a recreation of an archival photograph of The People’s Army – a self-defence group that was part of the East London Federation of the Suffragettes (ELFS) – posing with guns in Victoria Park, London, around 1914. The video’s ultimate image is something like a tableaux vivant, or a moving history painting, which takes place in front of a painted theatrical backdrop of the park. Today the history of the suffragette movement is celebrated in the UK, but what is often left out is that in their time they were considered to be terrorists by the British state.

The pencil drawings are based on early twentieth century press photographs of suffragettes being apprehended by the police. These women are shown in all their individuality, whereas the identities of the men are masked by their uniforms, and the actions they perform are indistinguishable from those of the police officers who violently break up protests today.

With thanks to Crossroads Women’s Centre and Focus E15 Campaign. Other contributors included: Yael Shavit (theatre director), Hannah Renton (production assistant), Lucy Pickering (sound recordist) and actors Angela Clerkin, Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo, Jenni Mackenzie Jones and Cherrelle Skeete.

Hold Hold Fire, 2019, was originally commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London.