Reframing Represention: Life Drawing with East London Strippers Collective

(s)exhibition. Museum of Sex Objects, London (11th May 2024)

A Spanner in the Works: Artists’ Interventions in Collections and Archives (Symposium) Norwhich University of the Arts (February 2024)

This paper explores counter-hegemonic interventions in art institutions, focusing on Life Drawing with East London Strippers Collective (ELSC). This initiative features exclusively current or former strippers as models, subverting the age-old practice of hiring professional harlots and hussies in art modelling.

Recognising striptease as a legitimate art form, these pole-dance drawing events offer a unique public experience. ELSC advocates for strippers, creating opportunities beyond the club and hosting sell-out events at prestigious institutions including the Royal Academy of Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the British Museum. Visibility in such institutions aims to platform alternative narratives and challenge traditional practices, whilst working to dismantle stereotypes and stigma.  Reframing Representation brings to light the underrepresented role of sex workers in the Western art historical canon and explores ELSC events at arts institutions as sites of disruption to ask how we might, as grassroots groups, reimagine how art institutions display, support, and store creative work and how power imbalances at play might be challenged.

Initially presented as part of a symposium, this work was subsequently delivered as a performative lecture -part performance art, part academic presentation and performed nude - for the Museum of Sex Objects in May 2024 as an experiment in the transformations between subject/object. Following this, Reframing Representation was further developed as part of a collaboration between ELSC and the British Museum for a guided tour of the Museum’s collection, highlighting erotic art across time and cultures and interrogating the role of institutions in contextualising and influencing visual culture - in this case with specific reference to the British Museum's complex history.

A zine version of the work is now available to buy here.

Artwork courtesy of East London Strippers Collective, photos courtesy of Whoretographer