This exhibition presents work by a group of artists who all engage in defiance, a homage to Edith Garrud and the Suffragette Bodyguard Unit. The work is diverse in media, brought together by the artists’ interest in figurative abstraction. The exhibition takes place at 44GRS gallery, the second floor of a historic townhouse in Bloomsbury, London. Throughout the duration of the exhibition each weekend will see a set of accompanying events such as talks, discussions, music, screenings and readings. It will be a festival for the valiant, the buoyant and the scamps. The artists in this exhibition have been invited to take Edith and the Bodyguard Unit as a starting point, to explore the theme of fighting for something, the most fundamental of issues – permission to be who you are. This work is about having courage when you are afraid, having the strength to object to something, and making a space for yourself and others. Stories of the collective or the individual wanting to transform the status quo are perpetual, they have a past, a present and a future. Do we choose to fight openly in public or are we escape artists operating as much as possible outside society? Do we use smokescreens and camouflage as a matter of survival? This exhibition explores questions such as, ‘can I be my own bodyguard?’, ‘to what level are we willing to make sacrifices?’, and ‘what is my personal Modus Operandi?’ Through different media, material, colour and writings, the exhibition forms a narrative in itself, interrogating the relationship between interior and exterior space, the private and the public. The rooms of 44GRS are the book cover that hold the stories inside – a boundless place where we acknowledge active and passive resistance.
Using mixed media such as digital and physical artefacts, Deborah will give material form to one of the cities – the City of Gold – to ponder a world where all land masses shift to create one continent no longer able to provide mined gold. Her work questions the role of borders and the immediate material, social, and political influences of the border’s geographical context. Deborah Tchoudjinoff, 2022, Moving 360 Image
