Gaps is artist Aliah Malik’s first solo exhibition. This mixed-media show is disturbing and confrontational. It is a revealing and intimate exploration of the flipside of what we culturally accept as the meaning of feminity. The veneer of grooming and fashion, and the conventions of beauty, are stripped away. This is womanhood that that lives breathes, secretes and excretes.
Malik features a mattress with sheet spotted with blood perhaps signifying menstruation or the loss of virginity. As autobiographical as Tracey Emin’s unmade bed (My Bed, 1998), but here the artist goes further in her intimate self-revelation. As a society we recoil from waste and filth, most especially from that which comes from our own bodies. Rather than sweep it under the carpet, or wash her hands of it, Malik frames it and presents it back to us as contemporary art.
On the floor of the gallery is a monitor displaying a blue screen with a scraping machine-generated soundtrack. This introduces a disonnant ambience to the exhibition that builds on our natural recoil from the marks and images. The vulnerable screen works like the blue screen of Derek Jarman’s last film (Blue, 1993) in representing the artist: naked, contemplative and vulnerable as her most intimate details are exposed to the gaze of the viewer
This is a timely exhibition as it investigates similar territory to the Wellcome Foundation’s exhibition ‘Dirt: The filthy reality of everyday life (until 31 August) which deals with our ambivalent relationship with dirt in our society. Malik takes this theme to a more personal level. Her exhibition is challenging. In our modern society where life is branded, productised and sanitised, this artist asks us to reflect on our animal origins and inevitable mortality.
Gaps continues at “Shop” 18 Christmas Steps, Bristol BS1 5BS until 23 June (Monday to Saturday 12 to 6pm)
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