Words by Ben Luke and Louisa Buck.
As 130 galleries take part in this year’s fourth edition of the event, Ben Luke and Louisa Buck roundup some of their exhibition highlights, from John Baldessari to Michaël Borremans, Nan Goldin to BLCKGEEZER.
Jade de Montserrat describes her work as being “driven by a necessity to understand my body’s positioning within histories and legacies of cultural and social inequalities”. In Defence of Our Lives, her second solo show in Peckham, presents both large- and small-scale works on paper that combine text and fractured images of bodies to voice de Montserrat’s highly personal experiences of exploitation and violation and to interrogate issues of reproductive justice, race and trauma. Stemming from her experiments with collage, handmade books, original photographs and filmed performances, text and image are combined to address the viewer directly, and nowhere more so than in the piece from which the show takes its title, where text is overlaid against the colours of the Palestinian flag, a act which also affirms the artist’s solidity with “all oppressed peoples worldwide”.
