Guerrilla Girls: Is It Even Worse In Europe?
2016
“Guerrilla Girls: Is it even worse in Europe?” is the first ever UK solo show from the Guerrilla Girls, the feminist collective comprised of anonymous female artists and activists devoted to fighting sexism, racism and inequality within the art world. The inception of the show began in the summer of 2016, with – much like some of their previous work - the distribution of a questionnaire, this time targeted at 383 European museum directors and comprising of fourteen questions related to the scope of diversity and equal opportunity within their collections. The exhibition revisits their 1986 campaign “It’s Even Worse in Europe” and begins before the visitor has even stepped inside the gallery; a banner on the building’s façade reveals that only a quarter of the museums targeted by the group responded to their questionnaire, and encourages guests to view the exhibition to find out more information. In a small room on the first floor of the Whitechapel Gallery, the Guerrilla Girls – alongside co-curator Nayia Yiakoumaki – have displayed ten large coloured posters that feature a selection of both the questions they asked and the answers they received, broken down into various categories and satirically annotated. They’ve also dedicated an entire wall to the physical paper responses from each institution, displaying the mixture of both hand-written and typed pages in such a way that every single answer they received can be read first-hand by visitors.
There is a clear degree of social and, on a lesser scale, political, commentary visible throughout the exhibition, much like in every other piece of art ever produced by the Guerrilla Girls. The repeated use of satirical and rhetorical annotations serves to further highlight the issue of inequality within European institutions; a response that suggests the curation of art should be based purely on talent, and should remain blind to gender, race, or sexual orientation is met with a derisive “what planet are you on?”. There are also clear historical links; the group themselves stated that they intended for the project to pose the question of whether “museums today [are] presenting a diverse history of contemporary art, or the history of money and power”. The exhibition is as utterly linked to feminism as the Guerrilla Girls themselves, but it also explores equality -or a lack thereof – in terms of the representation of transgender artists, gender nonconforming artists and artists from Asia, Africa or South America.
The individual works in the gallery are very simplistic in nature, and most would lose their significance and impact if they were to be exhibited as stand alone solo pieces. Creatively and aesthetically they are not particularly striking or ground-breaking, but it is their capacity for communication, and the content that they convey, that makes them successful. The strength of the exhibition lies in its assemblage as a complete body of work. Although the overall curation of the show is very simple, the placement of one specific segment of the exhibition stands out due to its distinctly literal communication; the poster listing all of the institutions who did not respond to the questionnaire is not, like every other piece in the show, on one of the four walls of the gallery. Instead, it is deliberately relegated to the floor with an invitation to, quite literally, “walk on them”.