A woman in labour wails and moans with effort, her body barely visible in her semi-darkened home, where she’s giving birth. Surrounded by her family, and filmed by artist Robina Rose in 1977, it feels intrusive to look. Nearby, another woman just screams and screams and screams again, her face filling a big screen. Gina Birch is screaming for the brief length of a Super 8 film cartridge. Filmed in 1977, the same year that Birch formed the band The Raincoats with Ana da Silva, her 3 Minute Scream is pure defiance, ending with something like a laugh. Screaming, like childbirth, is exhausting work. The amplified sound of both these films in the second room of Women in Revolt! leaks between spaces. It echoes and leads you on even as you are confronted with the first work in this compendious survey, Maureen Scott’s 1970 painting in which a mother looks at us with a tired, silent stoicism as the child in her arms throws a full-on tantrum.
Throughout the show we keep coming back to women in extremis. These often parodic images and performances are women’s attempts to claim agency over their own bodies, and how they are represented. Anne Bean is photographed, in a series of shots, shouting the word “mortality” while she apparently drowns in a bath. We watch artist Liz Rideal’s face in a photo-booth as she records the moment of orgasm. This self-portrait, she said, “is about having control over my auto-portrait while in a state of lack of control”. There is a low-budget, DIY feel to much of what’s here. Coming from a period before the rise of the internet and social media, collectivity had to be found in person and via magazines, flyers, and ad hoc meetings. Music played a vital part. At once history lesson and archive (so many vitrines, so many magazine spreads and flyers, so many grainy talking head interviews and films shown on monitors, so many badges and slogans), you can’t always tell the ephemera from the art. Often, they are the same.
