Nottingham Contemporary

To accompany our exhibition by Lis Rhodes, Dissident Lines, we will be screening additional works all day, on four Saturdays across June and July, in the Space on the ground floor. Each film will be shown on a loop with some Hang on a Minute films screened as interludes.

Pictures on Pink Paper (1982) explores how language can create power relations and gender inequalities. The film begins with images of rural landscapes, which are described by three female voices using female pronouns. Words and phrases are continuously looped, repeated and rearranged, to emphasise familiar binaries, such as subject/ object and male/female. Photographs, drawings and sounds of washing-up, cooking and laundry explore female labour. Close-ups of anonymous hands at work speak to the invisible nature of domestic work.

The film ends with a song composed by the British feminist musician and composer Lindsay Cooper and sung by the German avant-garde singer Dagmar Krause. It is a fitting conclusion, asking, “Does nature produce the nature in us, or is it their nature that’s naturally not us?”