Pluma Sumaq's Nuestra en la Arena (Our Blessings in the Sand) Jonna Algarin Mojica
An exhibition opening in New York this week aims to use art to challenge “simplistic and stereotypical ideas around sex work and sex workers”, says Sebastian Köhn, one of the organisers of the show and the project director of the Open Society Foundations, a New York-based civil justice organisation. Sex Workers Pop-Up, on view from 10-15 March at 9 West Eighth Street, features installations, photographs, drawings and others works by more than 20 artists, most who are sex workers themselves.
Among the highlights is the immersive installation Invocation (2019) by the Japanese-American artist Midori, which debuted in the exhibition On Our Backs: the Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art last year. It consists of a hemp structure suspended from the ceiling and interwoven with objects donated to the artist by current and former sex workers. Visitors are invited to enter the cocoon-like piece, which is “like a prayer wheel made of cum rags”, the artist says. The work “tells tales of labour, craft, a life spent entertaining and also the division between the public and the private”, she says.
The grass-roots organisation Red Canary Song is presenting the multimedia work Mouth of the Coalmine (2018), which deals with the plight of a 38-year-old sex worker named Yang Song who fell to her death during a raid at the Queens massage parlour where she worked in 2017. “Yang Song was persecuted by the police and suffered a lot of the conditions that migrant labourers and sex workers are forced to suffer under extreme surveillance and decriminalisation,” says a member of Red Canary Song. The work comprises news clippings and photographs of street protests organised by the group as well as objects associated with massage parlours such as candles and an incense burner.
The artist Pluma Sumaq has devised an altar called Nuestra en la Arena (Our Blessings in the Sand) (2019). The installation fits into the Ifá religious tradition and is devoted to the deities Yemaya and Oxum, who “represent the river and the ocean and the inner abundance that we all have”, the artist says. The work includes the names of various US-based sex worker activists, objects traditional to the Ifá belief, and money to symbolise the spiritual idea of infinite wealth. The work is “dedicated to people who have been stigmatised for the way they earn income”, the artist says. “Even if people dont agree with our choices, were still here living purposefully and are supported by our spirituality.”
The New York-based artist Sun Kim has created an installation comprising various red umbrellas suspended from the ceiling that references the work Prostitute Pavilion by the Slovenian artist Tadej Pogacar. In the original work, which was shown at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, Pogacar collaborated with sex workers to organise a march through the streets in which participants yielding megaphones and red umbrellas aimed to draw attention to thRead More – Source
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