The artist’s performance shows us how capitalism renders everyone disposable
She carries multiple microphones like a burden, they hang limply at her side when not in use. All are cable-tied to thin lengths of metal; both weapon and tool, one can imagine being slapped with them, vicious and blunt. With a trancelike expression of confusion and bone-deep anger, performance artist Keira Fox repeatedly heaves roughly sawn sections of old door from their positions against the walls within the crowd, lining them parallel to one another along the length of the room like a pointless train track. She attempts to pick up several of the heavy, awkward pieces of wood together, and they slip from her grasp, splintering, leaving debris on the sad laminate floor. She drags them through her legs. Pulling them up to her, she embraces them, pressing her cheek against the painted grain as she mutters and shouts, caught in a futile choreography of labour without end or purpose. Her high-heeled black pumps are awkward and completely impractical for this task.
Her muttered and shouted words, the gallery notes tell us, are renderings of the testimonies of prisoners held on remand at Armagh women’s prison in Northern Ireland between 1982 and 1985. Otherworldly and desperate when heard in combination with the swooning then jagged soundscape by Vindicatrix, Fox exaggerates syllables that become almost incomprehensible. Utterances seem to burst from internal reflections into pointed confrontations with the audience. (“The gun be-neath her car-di-gan”; “it-’s kee-ping your dig-ni-ty more than a-ny-th-ing else”; “in the in-ter-est of se-cu-ri-ty”; “I’m sick of ly-ing in this sick bed”.) Language here is both pivotal and insufficient. (HIAR is an acronym for Hurt In A Row, suggesting a structuring of pain into repetition.)
Her dress, created by collaborator Louis Backhouse, is grey as old concrete, tight, but stifling, not sexy. Stains cover each buttock; muddled browns suggesting she may have sat in blood or excrement. (Armagh was the site of a no-wash protest between 1980 and 1981, resulting in increased abuse from the prison guards.) Traipsing the space with determination, her heeled feet rock on the unstable doors underfoot. Her stuttering and stumbling make one feel that her exterior world has overwhelmed all interiority. Towards the end of the 40-minute performance, the fragile order she has constructed is abandoned: she lifts the doors from their track and throws them into a pile at one end of the room, ruining her own work.
Bolding’s Mayfair gallery is a vast conference room with sterile lighting, cheap flooring and a permanent cloying atmosphere, where colours appear colourless. A territory stripped of everything save function. Fox’s mania-world fizzes in this environment. Grounded in her experience as a social worker engaging with survivors of domestic violence, Fox has often interrogated the (traumatic) impact of space, whether domestic or institutional, upon (women’s) bodies, navigating the politics of labour, and the use of the female body as an institution in itself.
It’s a boring catastrophe; surviving under capitalism requires spiritual and moral debasement. In HIAR, Fox renders this condition not as abstraction but as something endured in real time. While using her own body and centring the lived experiences of women, Fox makes a broader statement that capitalism renders everyone disposable. The invocation of Armagh’s women prisoners sharpens this: incarceration not as exception but an extension of the same system of control. With HIAR, Fox brings to the surface how the demands of capitalism are internalised, and how it encourages and perpetuates the violence we enact on ourselves, against our own natures.
HIAR was at Bolding Gallery, London, 2 April
