The Sexist Chair: Performance by Ray Filar

Description

The performance will be open to all. 

 

 

How do I make you feel? I've been screaming how do I make you feel, for years. When are you gonna listen to how I feel?

You like to look at a body that you shaped to bend how bodies don't, generally, bend, how limbs, don't generally, move, how a neck doesn't stay raised off the floor, how thighs don't stay crunched into chests, how shins don't bear weight, when her mouth does not open to shatter the illusion, to say that she has cramp, that her legs are on fire in this position she's been holding for 50 years.

 

 

'The Sexist Chair' is a performative reply to the 1969 sculpture 'Chair', created by a male artist, which is part of the permanent collection at Tate Britain. This performance was originally commissioned as part of Linda Stupart's I Want to Show You a Body, also at Tate Britain.

 

Ray Filar is a writer, artist, and PhD student in Gender Studies and Creative Writing at Sussex University. Their research in Gender Studies theorises important contemporary challenges for the UK sex worker movement. As part of their Creative Writing practice, they are developing a collection of prose-poetic essays about sex, work, criminalisation, queer bodies, and not liking the things you're supposed to.

 

This event is part of the conference Protest Art in the New Autocracy (20-21 June 2019). Further information about the conference is available here. 

Administrative assistance: events@crassh.cam.ac.uk