Right of Admission
Right of Admission is a site-specific project, which uses key locations as transmitters of specific cultural, historical and social meanings. Working directly with the general public, as well as within the structure of academic and creative environments ensures that their work engages with people of very different backgrounds and facilitates a unique dialogue into the themes of identity, gender, aspiration, geography and belonging.
Using their bodies and its appearance as key signifiers, Farieda Nazier and Alberta Whittle, through site-specific performative interventions, aims to problematize society’s growing fixation on bodily appearance, appraisal, classification and unofficial rights of admission. It is evident that these are deeply rooted in the politics of internalized racial and class-based hierarchies, and has been appropriated into our daily rituals of adornment and beautification. Based on this, the performances explore how western/ Eurocentric conventions of beauty, acceptability, appropriateness of dress and bodily features dominate as social conventions in post-colonial and diasporic settings. Furthermore the work aims to evoke dialogue around the role of these constructs in the occupation and access to public space – be it for work, leisure, transport, recreation, religious spaces etc. Right of Admission aims to critique how the body and its appearance remain a token site for race and class.
The performance activates the raced female body and its appearance as a vehicle to access aspirational spaces – which in many instances ascribes to hierarchies of race and class.
Right of Admission is a site-specific project, which uses key locations as transmitters of specific cultural, historical and social meanings. Working directly with the general public, as well as within the structure of academic and creative environments ensures that their work engages with people of very different backgrounds and facilitates a unique dialogue into the themes of identity, gender, aspiration, geography and belonging.
Using their bodies and its appearance as key signifiers, Farieda Nazier and Alberta Whittle, through site-specific performative interventions, aims to problematize society’s growing fixation on bodily appearance, appraisal, classification and unofficial rights of admission. It is evident that these are deeply rooted in the politics of internalized racial and class-based hierarchies, and has been appropriated into our daily rituals of adornment and beautification. Based on this, the performances explore how western/ Eurocentric conventions of beauty, acceptability, appropriateness of dress and bodily features dominate as social conventions in post-colonial and diasporic settings. Furthermore the work aims to evoke dialogue around the role of these constructs in the occupation and access to public space – be it for work, leisure, transport, recreation, religious spaces etc. Right of Admission aims to critique how the body and its appearance remain a token site for race and class.
The performance activates the raced female body and its appearance as a vehicle to access aspirational spaces – which in many instances ascribes to hierarchies of race and class.
