Decriminalised Futures
A Rally for Sex Workers’ Rights at the ICA
Yarli Allison & Letizia Miro, This is Not for Clients, 2021, steel sculpture, sound, moving image. Photograph by Anne Tetzlaff.
Sex work is work – so sex workers deserve the same rights as workers in any other industry. Decriminalised Futures, currently showing at the ICA, makes this demand. In line with the global sex workers’ rights movement, the group exhibition calls for full decriminalisation as the best legal model available to protect sex workers. Highlighting the history of the sex workers’ rights movement as well as the multiplicity of contemporary sex worker experiences, thirteen international artists present their work to explore the interconnected issues faced by sex workers, people of colour, trans people, migrants, and disabled people.
The exhibition forms part of an ongoing project of the same name, led by organisers from SWARM (Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement). In its celebration of creative expression as a tool for deeper solidarity between global social justice struggles, the power in Decriminalised Futures lies in the fact that this is art by sex workers, not just about sex workers from a sensationalised, othering perspective.
Aisha Mirza, the best dick i ever had was a thumb & good intentions, 2022, plants, white-back print, vinyl, selection of personal objects, mirror, faux fur, foam. Photo by Anne Telzlaff.
The first work in the exhibition could be a bedroom: an intimate view of feminine domesticity, with a fluffy pink rug and cushions. Aisha Mirza’s reflection on sacred space explores intimacy and power in a merging of the public and the private – plants hang by the window, and there is a book of secrets that visitors are invited to read and write in. It’s interactive, it’s a slumber party. A row of whips and paddles is strung across the wall; underneath it, the phrase, ‘i am a dominatrix, or, i believe you completely’ is written above a mirror. Evoking items of domination in a space of comfort and care presents the complexities of sex, desire, and sex work. Looking at myself in the mirror, I question who I am in this space. I read through the book of secrets, and move on.
Next, there is a table covered in copies of Unsustainable by Danica Uskert and Annie Mok, an intimate, honest and harrowing comic reflecting on the stigma levelled against sex workers. Presenting a story about love, perversion, and the healing and destructive power of role-play and BDSM relationships, the writer is quite literally an open book. Opposite is a sparse, cold installation: a desk and chair, with documentation in folders on the wall behind it, accentuating the harsh bureaucracy faced by migrants in the UK’s hostile environment. It’s particularly cutting in contrast to the warmth and intimacy displayed by other works in the exhibition.
Copies of Danica Uskert & Annie Mok’s Unsustainable, 2020, laid out on a table. Photograph by Anne Tetzlaff.
As Molly Smith and Juno Mac write in their 2018 book Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights, “Prostitution is heavy with meaning and brings up deeply felt emotions. This is especially the case for people who have not sold sex, and who think of it in symbolic terms.” The projection of fraught ideas about women’s bodies, innocence, and virginity in the mainstream can cloud the actual stories of sex workers, thus central to this exhibition is a focus on experiences, voices, and the ownership of these things. Sets of headphones line the wall down one side of the exhibition, where benches invite us to sit and listen without distraction. These sound installations cover the historical and socio-political dialogue about global labour rights and feminism, using excerpts from A Decriminalised Future: Sex Workers’ Festival of Resistance, hosted by SWARM in 2019. Combined with radical quotations which cover the walls, visitors are surrounded by the words of those usually sidelined, ignored, and spoken over.
Tobi Adebajo, eje (Blood), 2022, multimedia installation. Photograph by Anne Tetzlaff.
Tobi Adebajo’s three-screen video installation is the most immersive work here: red lights warm up the dark space, alluding to red-light districts, as well as the bloody and the bodily in a womb-like setting. Bass throbs and videos about state violence, sex, and disability play in curtained-off rooms. You’re not sure whether you’re allowed to enter; it feels as though you’ve transgressed a private, internal space.
In the upper galleries, films focus on narratives around sex work, queerness, abusive legislation, archives, joy, and pain. One that stood out to me in particular was Yarli Allison and Letizia Miro’s two-screen work, This Is Not for Clients (2021), which explores Miro’s shifting identities through her journey as a sex worker. The insistent refrain, “That’s why I am a good whore”, becomes increasingly troubling as the video progresses.
Screenshot from This is Not For Clients by Yarli Allison and Letizia Miro, split-screen film, 2021, image courtesy the artists.
For all its tenderness, care, and calls for solidarity, Decriminalised Futures is bound to ruffle a few feathers – one review describes it as “an aesthetically and morally bankrupt hymn to ‘sex work’”. For those still unwilling to listen to the myriad of real voices and experiences of real sex workers, the exhibition might be challenging. What the work presents, ultimately, is that the general conversation urgently needs to progress – as sex work exists, and the criminalisation of sex work actively puts workers in more danger, what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about all exploitative jobs and industries? What potentials do decriminalised futures hold?
Decriminalised Futures is on view at ICA, London, until 22 May 2022.
