27 august 2021, Flor Linckens
Sarah Maple: “When people see my work, I want them to feel something”
During the weekend of 3 to 5 September, the gallery season will be opened in Amsterdam in a festive way. You can, for example, see an exciting solo exhibition by the rebellious artist Sarah Maple in KochxBos Gallery. Maple has been making images for years that have, thematically, become indispensable in 2021’s visual culture, particularly on Instagram. But in 2008, these were certainly not mainstream and even ensured that Maple received several death threats. During her first solo show in London in 2008, someone threw a brick through the gallery window. Maple makes controversial self-portraits that show her wearing a diaper or in which she smokes a cigarette or hugs a pig while dressed in a hijab. In 2011, she made a painting in which she visibly menstruates through a white dress. Maple: "I’m interested in women being shamed for just having functioning parts." Maple also made a series of images showing her as a number of famous Disney princesses, in spheres that are often considered to be quintessentially male, like a science lab, parliament or the boardroom.
But although these kinds of feminist topics are more open to discussion in 2021, there is also much more online hatred in return. For example, the work “The Opposite of a Feminist Is an Arsehole”, shown in this exhibition, spawned a torrent of online insults and threats. Maple: “Someone sent me a photo of an actual arsehole in response. But now I can laugh it off and just block them.”
The British artist first attracted attention when she won the 4 New Sensations television competition in 2007, a collaboration between Channel 4 and Saatchi Gallery that was conceived as a way of scouting promising art graduates. In 2011 and 2012, two documentaries were made about her life and work and in 2015, she was awarded the prestigious Sky Academy Arts Scholarship, worth £30,000. Her work has also been shown on the London Underground and in 2018, she made a limited edition cover for the British Harper's Bazaar, along with artists including Yayoi Kusama and Barbara Kruger.
Sarah Maple, Self portrait with square pocket, 2021, Koch x Bos Gallery
Maple works in a multitude of disciplines: from photography and painting to performance, video art and mixed media. She is known for the humorous ways in which she discusses relevant topics: from identity, gender and religion to sexism, Islamophobia, stereotypes, popular culture, freedom of expression, toxic forms of masculinity and the art world. The latter emerges, for example, in one of her latest works, which can be seen in the gallery from 3 September. In the fictional “The Sarah Maple Show” sitcom, Maple examines the art world and her role as an artist in a satirical and semi-autobiographical way. Of course, Maple also reflected on the past two years. During Art Rotterdam, she showed a gigantic sign with the text “The World As We Know It”, which was located in an equally enormous container.
Sarah Maple, The World As We Know It, 2019, Koch x Bos Gallery.
When a journalist from The Guardian asked her about a key work in her practice, she chose the work “I Wish I had a Penis”, from which the exhibition at KochxBos Gallery takes its title. In it, we see Maple in a triptych in traditional Muslim clothing, lingerie and a men’s suit respectively, while carrying placards that read 'I Wish I Had a Penis', 'Because Then I'd Fuck You', followed by 'Then Steal Your Job'. Maple: “I was at university and we’d go round doing crits, talking about each others’ work. Every time a man got up to speak, we’d be really supportive. But every time a woman spoke, we’d berate her. I realised I was complicit – subconsciously, we’d all taken on that conditioning. It was the first time I realised I might be held back by being a woman. The phrase ‘I wish I had a penis’ just came into my head. So I did that work based on it. When I took it into uni, although all the tutors liked it, everyone else berated me. Then I put it on MySpace and got all these amazing responses. People started sending me their own. That’s the moment I realised that, through humour, I could really communicate something.”
That predictive feminist outlook is also reflected in a 2010 work that is featured in the exhibition, in which Britney Spears' famous bald head is recreated in a painting that is somewhat reminiscent of a work by Frida Kahlo, one of Maple's sources of inspiration. In 2007, Britney's actions [in which she shaved her head out of desperation] were widely reported by the press, in a way that we would perceive in 2021 as disrespectful and sexist, just like the way Monica Lewinsky was portrayed in the media — and is now somewhat rehabilitated. Especially now, in the context of Free Britney, we look at Britney's life and actions with more compassion. Maple is fascinated by the ways in which women can lose control of their lives and bodies. Maple: “I'm interested in the ways we're trying to regain that control. I found something powerfully poetic in this act, as if removing hair, so related to feminine beauty and sexuality ,could be a way to regain control of our lives and bodies.”
Sarah Maple, If I loved You It Was Because Of Your Hair, 2010, Koch x Bos Gallery.
But Maple's feminism is actually intersectional, as her bicultural background plays an important role in her work. She was born as the daughter of a white British father and a Kenyan-Punjabi (Pakistani-Indian) mother who moved to Birmingham from Nairobi in the 1960s as a young woman. Maple grew up in the only Muslim family in Eastbourne, which she herself described as "the whitest place in the world". As a young girl she went to the mosque but she also went to a Catholic primary school. Her experiences as an outsider, with a sense of bicultural guilt, would form an important source of inspiration for her later work. Maple began to appreciate the complexities of her family history when she asked her mother how she got her British citizenship. Her mother reacted somewhat irritated. Maple: “She informed me in a ‘I can’t believe you don’t know this’ tone that obviously she was born a British citizen, as her Father worked for the British. She also informed me regardless of that, she was a ‘British subject’ as Kenya was ruled by the Empire. I took in the information and because I was a self indulgent teenager, didn’t give it much thought for a number of years. But it sat there, stored in the back of my mind. I am ashamed to say that it’s only the past few years that I’ve begun to fully understand my family history. And because of that, I can actually understand Britain. I think it was the conversations around Brexit that started it for me. All the negativity surrounding the campaign, the questions raised about who has the ‘right’ to be here, who has the ‘right’ to call Britain home."
